An Olympian Scoundrel

The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, by Bernard Wasserstein

It’s a funny thing, humour. What makes you laugh like a donkey may leave me with a face like an Easter Island statue, and of course vice-versa.

That my funny bone does not seem to be in the usual place is brought home to me every few months, when someone on Twitter asks people to name their Funniest Books Ever. The same titles come up repeatedly and these are always novels of a certain cast – the ones that have words like ‘rollicking’ and ‘outrageous’ in the blurb. Perhaps it’s just me, but I have tried a few of these rollickers and found them about as funny as the cry of the common loon, forlorning across a frozen lake at nightfall. The only things more desperate are the books by actual comedians (if you really hate laughing, read a book by a comedian).

My own experience tells me that the funniest books are nonfiction, and most of these are biographies. There really is nowt so strange, or funny, as folks (real ones). If I had to present my case, then Exhibit A would surely be Bernard Wasserstein’s The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (1988), the extraordinary, meticulous, marvellously funny biography of a man who was – well, what exactly?

In his foreword Wasserstein seeks to explain how a serious academic historian became obsessed by a character he describes as ‘part-parasite, part-irritant, part-entertainer’. We learn that it all began one afternoon in the mid-1980s, when a summer downpour left him stranded in the Bodleian Library. Idly, he started to browse the Index to the General Correspondence of the Foreign Office (usually a reliably dull source) and for no identifiable reason looked up a half-remembered name: Ignatius Trebitsch Lincoln. Like a spell, the words opened a portal to another stranger world, with minute after memo after telegram logging the diverse, baffling, and always preposterous activities of Trebitsch in locations ranging from Budapest to Shanghai.

‘I started to read while waiting for the storm to pass,’ writes Wasserstein, ‘and the tempest has not yet abated.’ For several years, he would pursue his antihero through archives held in seven or eight countries and a dizzying multiplicity of aliases, frauds, conspiracies, and scams. And more remarkably still, he would shape this material into a lucid, disturbing, and wildly funny narrative

Even in its bare bones, the story unearthed by Wasserstein is mind-boggling. Ignácz or Ignatius Trebitsch was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in 1879, and as a young man drifted into a life of petty crime. Having converted to Christianity, he fetched up in Canada, where he became the star preacher of the Montreal Mission to the Jews. As would invariably occur, Trebitsch dazzled with his charm and energy before infuriating everyone with his absurd egotism. By 1903 he was in England, where he added the name ‘Lincoln’ as a token of his new passion: politics.

An entrée to this wider world was provided by B. S. Rowntree, the Quaker cocoa magnate, who persuaded him to stand as a Liberal in the election of 1910. Sensing his disadvantage as a foreigner, Trebitsch turned his eloquence on the filthy German custom of eating dogs (ring any bells?) and gained a famous victory. However, he soon stood down to focus on business, having set up a bunch of shonky companies to exploit the oil boom in central Europe. When the oil ran out, Trebitsch faced ruin and took the fatal step of forging a crucial document. Exposure could be only a matter of time, and would block any way back to his life as a semi-respectable sort of grifter.

Wasserstein pinpoints the next phase as crucial to the birth of Trebitsch Lincoln, International Man of Mystery. With the advent of war, Trebitsch saw a way out of his predicament. Boldly, he called at the War Office and offered to infiltrate German Intelligence as a double agent. He then met German officials and suggested the converse. Before much could come of all this, exposure over the forgery loomed and in 1915 he hightailed it across the Atlantic.

Probably no one but Trebitsch would have thought to deflect a charge of fraud by accusing himself of high treason, but this is effectively what he did. In a series of pieces for the US press he built up his inconsequential dealings with the spy agencies into a tale worthy of John Buchan; he had been a foreign agent for years, he now insisted, acting always from a principled hatred of England.

The super-spy was duly collared: but managed to escape through a lavatory window. Typically, rather than lying low he went to a New York newspaper office and gave a bombastic press conference. When he was recaptured, his pockets full of press clippings about himself, he congratulated the police on catching ‘the cleverest man in America’.

Trebitsch was returned to England and went down for three years. And yet if anyone supposed this the end of the story, they would be mistaken. ‘The British Government knows that they are not done with me,’ the master-spy rumbled ominously. With the help of the press, he had remade himself as a Fu Manchu-like super-villain and he would spend the rest of his days trying to live out this extraordinary conceit. The remarkable thing is how nearly he succeeded.

On his release Trebitsch made his way to Berlin and plunged almost immediately into the atmosphere of febrile conspiracy brewing in right-wing circles. With a grisly crew of confederates he helped to foment the Kapp Putsch of March 1920 – a bungled coup in which militarists briefly seized control of the state. ‘We shall come again,’ Trebitsch cackled in his best Bond-villain way, as it all collapsed around him; and yet this time the effect is less comic than chilling. In the last hours of the Putsch he had met with a new recruit, a certain ex-corporal who would be rather more than a footnote to history. In Wasserstein’s words, the Putsch ‘began as comic opera and ended as melodrama, but . . . may also be seen as a dress rehearsal for tragedy’.

As for Trebitsch himself, the Daily Telegraph had few doubts that he would be back:

There is something almost Olympian about this man’s scoundrelism . . . I have heard it variously suggested that he was in the movement as a Bolshevik, as a British, and as a French spy. Possibly he was all these . . . The world will watch with interest to see at what point this really remarkable rogue will crop up next.

Within weeks Trebitsch was in Hungary, at the centre of a still more dangerous plot: the creation of a ‘White International’ to stir up counter-revolutionary action throughout Europe. Its leaders would include White Russian generals and fanatical right-wingers from half a dozen states. Where Trebitsch’s earlier associates-cum-dupes had been a mostly herbivorous lot – Quakers, missionaries, Liberals – he was now consorting with terrorists, thugs, and murderous antisemites (one of whom arrived at dinner boasting ‘that he had an excellent appetite . . . as he had spent the afternoon roasting a Jew’).

As a Jew himself, Trebitsch began to feel distinctly unsafe and fled to Vienna with a suitcase full of stolen plans. These he attempted to hawk to British and French diplomats, only to be dismissed as a liar and fantasist. He was even arrested by the Austrians for attempted fraud (with the threat of a further charge of treason if his story turned out to be true). Meanwhile, he was stalked through the streets of Vienna by White agents seeking his death.

Wisely, Trebitsch decided that it was time for another disappearing act. ‘My destination is a profound secret,’ he announced, ‘I shall disappear as if the earth had swallowed me and shall reappear in an unexpected quarter . . .’

That quarter turned out to be the Szechwan province of China, where he surfaced some time in 1922. Not even Wasserstein can dig up much about his doings, but it seems that he served several rival warlords as an arms dealer, loan-broker, and all-purpose consigliere.

China also provides the scene for the last and most astounding phase of Trebitsch’s career – a twist that no reader could possibly have foreseen. By late 1925 he had come to believe that his life had been futile, and so by definition was any kind of worldly activity. ‘I made the great renunciation,’ he would write, ‘I forced the doors of the lunatic asylum open and – walked out.’

For five years Trebitsch would immerse himself in the study of Chinese Buddhism and in 1931 he became a monk, adopting the name Chao Kung. The initiation involved an agonizing ritual in which his shaved head was branded with religious symbols and from this time he dressed in a skull cap and flowing robes. In 1932 he set up his own monastery in Shanghai with 13 European converts. ‘My work is to help suffering humanity,’ he proclaimed, ‘You are all doomed by your wickedness and folly!’

Not for the first time, we are left wondering what on earth to think. Wasserstein’s view is that Trebitsch was quite genuine in his newfound religious convictions, however questionable his conduct (there would be allegations concerning the younger nuns). Judgement is made more difficult by the way Trebitsch’s always fervent self-belief had curdled into something bordering on the psychotic.

Not only had he taken to lecturing world leaders on their duties, in the most peremptory terms, but he believed he had a telepathic link to certain ‘Supreme Masters’ of Tibet, whose spiritual powers made them all but omnipotent. So at Christmas 1939, for example, he writes to demand the resignation of every government fighting the war (except the Japanese), as otherwise the Masters will ‘unchain forces and powers whose very existence are unknown to you’. Similarly, in 1941 he demands a personal interview with Hitler, claiming that any doubts the Führer might have will disappear when three of the Masters step through his walls . . .

Despite claiming to have abjured politics, Trebitsch spent the war years in tortuous, mostly pro-Axis, intrigues and made enemies who could hardly have been more lethal. When the end came, it would be in a baffling manner wholly appropriate to the life he had lived. In 1943 he was arrested by Japanese gendarmes and within weeks came reports that he had died of a gastric complaint. Wasserstein is generally the most cautious of historians but leans to the view that he was poisoned

There is a cruel comedy in the very shape of Trebitsch’s career: the way in which each minor deception leads him into greater frauds, deeper and more dangerous waters. With its ever-escalating jeopardy, his story has the relentless mechanics of farce (which are also those of tragedy).

The story of Trebitsch Lincoln is by any standards a strange one, but what makes it so very funny? Cheats and scammers are always potentially funny, I guess, so long as we are not their victim. The comedy of rogues has a long pedigree – from the trickster tales found in most cultures through to present-day ‘caper’ movies.

More to the point, though, is Trebitsch’s extraordinary personality. He has the folie de grandeur of the classic sitcom character – a Tony Hancock or Captain Mainwaring – but blown up to an apocalyptic scale. This is the man who admonishes George V that ‘millions of Buddhists . . . throughout Asia are solidly behind me’ when he has a handful of adherents; the would-be Dr Evil who warns diplomats to heed his words ‘before I press the button and inaugurate . . . a new period of bloodshed’. Wasserstein quotes Trebitsch at length and it is this voice – absurd, bombastic, petty, and querulous – that echoes in the mind long after the book is closed.

There is also a cruel comedy in the very shape of Trebitsch’s career: the way in which each minor deception leads him into greater frauds, deeper and more dangerous waters. With its ever-escalating jeopardy – from petty theft to forgery to high treason and hobnobbing with Nazis – his story has the relentless mechanics of farce (which are also those of tragedy).

It’s also the way Wasserstein tells ‘em. The historian is a natural storyteller, with an eye for the ludicrous comic detail that verges on the Dickensian. Perhaps the most cherishable revelation is that Trebitsch owned an expensive set of bed linen, monogrammed with his initials, and allowed this to dictate his numerous pseudonyms. We can only imagine the groans from the Foreign Office as reports come in (yet again) that a Tibor Lehotzky, Theodor Lakatos, Thomas Lorincz, or Leo Tandler is up to something murky in Central Europe . . .

Wasserstein’s canniest move, however, is to play straight man to his own protagonist. No matter how bonkers it gets, Trebitsch’s story is told as if it were a perfectly serious and quite conventional piece of history, to be underpinned at each point by scholarly citation. Only occasionally does the biographer forgo his neutral tone and allow himself an exasperated aside (‘What, it may be asked was the point of this nonsensical contretemps?’; ‘Not content with the organization of this boondoggle . . .’ ). There is a magnificent, laugh-aloud moment towards the end where Wasserstein finally permits himself to rebuke ‘this utterly impossible, preposterous and disgusting man’. It is all the more powerful (and hilarious) for the restraint that has preceded it.

As a historian, Wasserstein feels obliged to draw some sort of wider significance from his subject and does so mainly by placing him in his times – the era of world crisis and collapsing empires that saw the rise of Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler. In this context, Trebitsch can be seen less as a one-off joke and more as a ‘microcosm of global lunacy’.

Uncomfortably, anyone reading his story today will be struck by nearer parallels. With an ability to ‘reinvent himself’ to equal that of any postmodern celebrity, Trebitsch is in some ways a weirdly contemporary figure. A born troll, he would certainly wreak entertaining havoc in our ‘post-truth’ society of fake news and ‘alternative facts’. His Twitter would be a blast. We can all think of modern leaders who remind us a bit of Trebitsch Lincoln (in some cases, bigly). We may or may not find this funny.

A shorter version of this review was published in Slightly Foxed No. 76.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in my ebook The Whartons of Winchendon —a short study of one of the strangest families in English history, featuring incest, treason, deep-sea diving, fairies, and the self-proclaimed Solar King of the World.