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When Afghanistan represented Egypt in the Bonn Republic:
The case of an Egyptian passport and Afro-Asian Cold War diplomacy

Sonja Hegasy

Ahmed Hegazy 1960, Miami, Alexandria, Egypt.jpg
Ahmed Hegazy 1960, Miami, Alexandria, Egypt.jpg

After graduating from Cairo University in 1960, and with half a year of practical work at various public pharmacies in Cairo, Ahmed Hegazy [1] came to West Germany through the Studienmission (study mission) of the Egyptian Ministry of Education and Teaching to pursue a doctorate in pharmaceutical technology. He had taken German lessons in Egypt, and upon arrival took part in a two-month language course at the Goethe-Institute in Radolfzell. In 1963, he passed the entrance examination for the doctorate at the Technische Hochschule Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig. Three years later, he received his doctorate, supervised by Prof. Walther Awe, with a thesis on “Contributions to the Analytics of Pantothenic Acid and Pantothenol”.​​

Fig. 1. Portrait photograph Ahmed Hegazy, Alexandria, 17.08.1960. Private Collections Sonja Hegasy.

Student missions to Europe for study in the Arts and Sciences have a long history in Egypt, with a first group of forty students having been sent to France by Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1826. Rifāʿa at-Tahtāwī (1801-1873), a cleric, writer and translator, who stayed in Paris until 1831, became the most famous among them. He translated European history books, as well as books on engineering, philosophy, French civil law, trade law, the military, and the French constitution into Arabic. Tahtāwī published his observations on European culture, modernisation, and industrialisation in The Extrication of Gold in Summarizing Paris (which rhymes in Arabic: Taḫlīṣ al-ibrīz fī talḫīṣ Bārīz) [2]. Tahtāwī was one of the first Egyptian thinkers to write about Western culture from the perspective of a nineteenth century Muslim. Every child in Egypt is still familiar with him.

Ahmed Hegazy was one out of 804 students from the United Arab Republic (UAR) that came to West Germany in the winter semester 1961/62. [3] For nearly six years he received a monthly stipend of 600 DM from the Egyptian Studienmission to cover his daily expenses and school fees (around 225 DM/semester). Later on, after the completion of his doctoral studies, when he decided not to return to Egypt, Hegazy had to pay back the amount subsequent to taking up work (fig. 2). In 1966, the pharmaceutical company Bayer hired him prospectively to work for a plant in Egypt that Bayer intended to buy. When this plan failed, the company offered him a position in Leverkusen, first as plant manager at its penicillin factory, later on as laboratory manager in galenics, and finally as department head at the Institute for Pharmaceutical Technology for Liquid and Semi-Solid Pharmaceutical Forms. Until his retirement in 1999, Ahmed Hegazy conducted research in the Pharmaceutical Technology Department of Bayer and lived in Leverkusen. He developed ten patents for the company. [4]​

Fig. 2: Certificate (Bescheinigung) issued to Hegazy by the Studienmission of the United Arab Republic (UAR) stating that his monthly stipend during his doctoral studies in Germany (1961-67) amounted to 600 DM and that Hegazy started its repayment in monthly installments in November 1968. Private Collections Sonja Hegasy.

Fig. 2: Certificate (Bescheinigung) issued by the Studienmission of the United Arab Republic (UAR) to Hegazy stating that his monthly stipend during his doctoral studies in Germany (1961-67) amounted to 600 DM and that Hegazy started its repayment in monthly installments in November 1968. Private Collections Sonja Hegasy.

When Hegazy lost his passport in 1969, he had to turn to the Royal Afghan Embassy in Bad Godesberg. The document shown in fig. 3 (Bescheinigung issued on 26.07.1969) attests that Ahmed Hegazy reported the loss of his UAR passport and that he will duly receive a new travel document within three months. Until then, German authorities should accept this paper as a substitute for the passport. The backside of the document (fig. 4) shows us the provisional unbefristete Aufenthaltserlaubnis (permanent residence permit), which was issued anew with the new passport. Besides, the backside has a visa issued for Switzerland, illustrating that Hegazy used this document as a substitute passport and German visa when travelling for a conference at the ETH in Zürich in September 1969.

Fig. 3: Photograph of document (Bescheinigung) issued on 26.07.1969 by the Royal Afghan Embassy in Bad Godesberg, Germany, which had taken over the consular services for the Egyptian embassy. The document attests that Ahmed Hegazy reported the loss of his United Arab Republic (UAR) passport and that he would duly receive a new passport within three months. Private Collections Sonja Hegasy.

Fig. 3: Photograph of document (Bescheinigung) issued on 26.07.1969 by the Royal Afghan Embassy in Bad Godesberg, Germany, which had taken over the consular services for the Egyptian embassy. The document attests that Ahmed Hegasy reported the loss of his United Arab Republic (UAR) passport and that he would duly receive a new passport within three months. Private Collections Sonja Hegasy.

Fig. 4: Back-side of Bescheinigung (in figure 3) showing Hegasy’s substitute permanent residence and a visa issued for Switzerland, 1969. Private Collections Sonja Hegasy.

Fig. 3. Backside of Bescheinigung (fig. 3) showing Hegasy’s substitute permanent residence and a visa issued for Switzerland, 1969. Private Collections Sonja Hegasy.

In fact, the United Arab Republic, in whose name the embassy of Afghanistan issued this certificate, no longer existed by this time. This short-lived union of Egypt, Syria, and North Yemen, under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser from 1958 to 1961, was an effort to showcase Pan-Arabism. But the union did not serve as a good example of the pan-Arab promise: Syria (to say nothing of Yemen) was treated as an appendix, with the joint government in the main consisting of Egyptians in the UAR’s capital of Cairo. However, the Egyptian government decided to keep the name UAR for eleven more years after its dissolution. Thus, in 1965 it was the UAR – not the Arab Republic of Egypt - that cut diplomatic ties when the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) established diplomatic relations with the state of Israel, twenty years after the end of the Second World War. Although the Israeli side had already asked for an exchange of ambassadors in the 1950s, the Federal Foreign Office repeatedly positioned itself against it. The reason being the Hallstein Doctrine (1955), according to which the FRG claimed to be the sole international representative of Germany. For the FRG, this meant thwarting any efforts by the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to gain international recognition as a sovereign state. As a consequence, FRG did not want to alienate the Arab states by moving closer to the state of Israel, which most likely would have resulted in a counter reaction and an intensification of Arab exchanges with the GDR.​

The prerogative of FRG’s foreign policies not to antagonise “their Arab allies” was partly a twisted left-over from the Third Reich, as well as from the colonial competition between Great Britain and Germany in the Middle East. Third Reich policies towards Arabs in Europe, or towards Arab states at the time, were highly contradictory and the Nazi-executive did not know how to treat Arab nationals within the raster of Semites/non-Semites. Thus, a generally pro-Arab stance cannot be claimed for the National-socialist state. Nonetheless, even after WWII the policies of the Foreign Federal Office were still shaped by individual pro-Arab positions, as visible in a continuity of this blurry past as well as resentment towards the state of Israel. Many Nazis found refuge in Egypt after WWII, working in the military sector for the Nasser government. Experts in aircraft and rocket construction were no longer able to achieve anything in their field in West Germany and therefore left the country. Obviously, the Federal Foreign Office that had established diplomatic relations with Egypt already in 1952 and the embassy in Cairo were in touch with these Germans. Walter Becker, Ambassador to Cairo from 1954 till 1959 and just one example of biographical continuity in the Federal Foreign Office, advised not to alienate the Arab side by any means! He had been a career diplomat from 1921 till 1945. Becker had joined the NSDAP on 1 November 1935. Nothing is known about his Denazification.

In 1965, Nasser invited the GDR’s head of state Walter Ulbricht, to pay a state visit to Cairo. It was the first high-ranking invitation for Ulbricht outside the Soviet Union. West German diplomats were horrified. In a secret telex sent on 26 January 1965 from the FRG's Ambassador Federer in Cairo (1964/65) to State Secretary Karl Carstens, Federer suggested that the most viable solution to save the Hallstein Doctrine was to stop the unofficial supply of arms to Israel if the Egyptian side, in return, was ready to disinvite Ulbricht: “At the center of the 'package deal' – as I have repeatedly pointed out – must be the cessation of arms aid to Israel.” [5] Six days later, Federer reported on his meeting with president Abdel Nasser in a secret telex with priority [6]. Federer had worked for the Auswärtiges Amt from 1935 to 1945 and took over a leading position at the relief organisation of the Protestant Church (Evangelisches Hilfswerk) after the war. As in Becker’s case, nothing is known about his Denazification. The telex reveals the course of the conversation between President Nasser and Ambassador Federer, both of whom fought hard for their agenda. But Nasser declined to disinvite Ulbricht and was unimpressed by the efforts Ambassador Federer made (according to the latter's own account): 

"Nasser now began to point out - in an agitated and bitter tone - that we only ever thought about the worries that the GDR was causing us, but that we never took into consideration the worries that Israel was causing the Arabs. We were bound to Israel through thick and thin. We not only supplied weapons, but also supported Israel's economy and granted Israel political influence in the Federal Republic. This had now prompted him to give in to Ulbricht's years of insistence that he be invited to Cairo.” [7]  

Against the advice of the Federal Foreign Office, and to the surprise of everyone else involved (including the Israeli side), Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard single-handedly offered Israel diplomatic relations on 9 March 1965. Until then, the FRG had only signed a reparation agreement with Israel (with great resistance from and among West German politicians) that agreed to pay three billion DM in kind to the state of Israel and 450 million DM to the Jewish Claims Conference. Erhard's intention was, for one, to perform an act of liberation from the reins of the USA. They had insisted that Nasser should not be snubbed so that Egypt under Nasser would not “defect” to the socialist bloc. Erhard, however, “saw his decision as an opportunity to punish [sic, SH] Nasser for inviting Ulbricht to Cairo – after all, this had brought the GDR head of state unprecedented international attention, combined with the risk of legitimising Ulbricht as a political leader and the existence of the GDR as a German state.” [8] In the logic of the Cold War, to downgrade Ulbricht was more important than an open foreign policy rapprochement with Israel.

In response to the exchange of ambassadors between West Germany and Israel, almost half of the member states of the Arab League broke off diplomatic relations with Bonn. For Egyptian citizens, the Afghan representation took over consular duties until 1974. This explains the unexpected case of why the Royal Afghan Embassy in Bad Godesberg issued the passport replacement for Ahmed Hegazy, an Egyptian citizen. A real case of Afro-Asian diplomacy, this example shows how the so-called innerdeutsche Frage (inner-German question) played out as an Afro-Asian entanglement on the diplomatic level, as well as in the everyday. ​​

Coda

  • Egypt established official diplomatic ties with the GDR in 1969.

  • Israel and the GDR never had diplomatic relations.

  • Anwar el-Sadat restored diplomatic relations with the FRG in 1974. 

  • Ahmed Hegazy never went to Afghanistan.

Notes​

[1] Hegazy with ‘z’ and ‘s’ are both spellings in use in Germany, even in official documents, as can be seen in the following.

[2] Published in English under the title “An Imam in Paris. Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric (1826–1831)”. London 2011.

[3] Research data centres (RDC) of the Federal Statistical Office and Statistical Offices of the Federal States of Germany, Studierende mit Staatsangehörigkeit "Vereinigte Arabische Republik (Ägypten und Syrien)" ab Wintersemester 1959/60 (ab WS 1971/72 "Ägypten"), 1959-2024, 11 December 2024.

[4] Patents by Ahmed Hegasy, https://patents.justia.com/inventor/ahmed-hegasy . Accessed November 28, 2024.

[5] Federer to State Secretary Carstens, 26.1.1965. In: AAPD 1996, p. 194 (author’s translation). 

[6] AAPD 1965, pp. 227-30.

[7] Federer to State Secretary Carstens, 1.2.1965. In: AAPD 1996, p. 228 (author’s translation).

[8] De Vita, Annäherung 2015, p. 34 (author’s translation). 

Bibliography

Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (AAPD) 1965, vol. 1. Ed. by Mechthild Lindemann, Ilse Dorothee Pautsch, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1996.

De Vita, Lorena. „Annäherung im Schatten der Hallstein-Doktrin Das deutsch-deutsch-israelische 1965" Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, January 30, 2015.

https://www.bpb.de/shop/zeitschriften/apuz/199902/annaeherung-im-schatten-der-hallstein-doktrin/. Accessed October 25, 2024.

Hegasy, Sonja (with Stephan Stetter and René Wildangel). “Orient-ations: German scholarship on the Middle East since the nineteenth century.” In Knowledge production in higher education. Between Europe and the Middle East, edited by Michelle Pace and Jan Claudius Völkel. Manchester University Press, 39-59, 2023. 

Voigt, Sebastian. „Das Verhältnis der DDR zu Israel.“ Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 28.3.2008. Accessed October 25, 2024. www.bpb.de/internationales/asien/israel/45014/ddr-israel?p=all.

Author: Sonja Hegasy

Affiliation: Leibniz-Zentrum Moderne Orient (ZMO), Berlin

Date: 11.12.2024

 

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