The Hunt for the Holy Wheat Grail: A not so ‘botanical’ expedition in 1935 Author : Thomas Ruttig Published: 20 July 2015 Downloaded: 6 September 2018 Download URL: https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/the-hunt-for-the-holy-wheat-grail-a-not-so-botanical-expedition- in-1935/?format=pdf AAN has just reported about an area in Central Afghanistan, the Shah Foladi in the Koh-e Baba mountain range, that was recently declared a new conservation area for its botanical diversity. This reminded AAN’s co-director Thomas Ruttig of a first ‘botanical’ expedition – 80 years ago, in 1935 – to another isolated mountainous region of Afghanistan: Nuristan. It was organised by Germany, and it was the first scientific expedition allowed into the country by the Afghan government after the reign of Amanullah (apart from the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA) that came in 1922 by request of the Afghan government). But the German Nazi regime was not only after plants. On the morning of 28 May [1935], we depart from Kabul. A last piece of luggage is handed onto the lorry, a last rope tied. Undecided we stand in the garden of the German legation. Maybe, 1 / 8 we shall return in two weeks as the defeated heroes. ‘Inshallah’, God willing, we shall succeed. The route leads parallel to the northern slopes of the Safid Koh. It is a powerful landscape of gravel, folded and jagged, traces of ice age flows. Over depressions and heights, the road leads, soon down into the bed of a dried out river, then up again into altitudes of more than 3000 meters. This is how Albert Herrlich (1902–70), the doctor of the “German Hindukush Expedition” of 1935, described the first day of their journey in his book Land des Lichtes: Deutsche Kundfahrt zu den unbekannten Völkern des Hindukusch (Land of Light: German exploratory tour to the unknown peoples of the Hindukush), (1) published in Munich in 1938. From the Kabul-Jalalabad road, the group turned north, into the Kunar and Pech valleys and, over the Mum Pass, into the Kantiwa/Parun valleys, then into the uncharted territories of western Nuristan, the Shuk, Ramgel, Kulam (Kolangar), Kolatan, Achenu and Waigal valleys. Millet and cedars The stated aim of the expedition was to find the Urweizen, the original wild wheat. (2) Therefore, the expedition of six Germans – along with Afghan support staff, ie drivers, cooks and servants, (3) and two officials as escort (one a police colonel of Nuristani origin) – consisted of a botanist (Gerhart Kerstan from Leipzig), three agronomists (Werner Roemer from Halle, Klaus von Rosenstiel from Müncheberg and Arnold Scheibe from Gießen, who was the head of the group), and Wolfgang Lentz (a philologist from Berlin). It was completed by the already mentioned doctor, Albert Herrlich from Munich, who also was an anthropologist based in Kabul, as the German embassy’s doctor. (Lentz also joined the group from Kabul.) All were between 26 and 35 years of age. Herrlich defined the expedition’s task: We are supposed to collect live material, first of all grain seeds of all kinds. Our focus is on wheat and barley; but also forage plants, fruit and vegetable species interest us. No particular mountain, no particular valley is defined as the destination. A multitude of Hindukush valleys must be visited, in order to obtain materiel on the broadest base. What is growing today on Europe’s fields is a fully accidental heritage. We know that the home of important grain species cannot be found in the old agricultural countries but in the high valleys and steppes of West and Central Asia. The idea seemed to be obvious not to leave this accidental heritage at that [and to regain “attributes that withered” during the “crossbreeding” of the original seeds and the “industrialisation of agriculture.”] The expedition members thus collected samples of all agricultural species in the Nuristan valleys: “barley, wheat, corn and, first of all, millet and millet again. They [the villagers] bring us beans, peas, lentils etc.” In the Waigal, the only grain they found was millet: Everywhere in Nuristan, millet is grown. But the Waigalis are masters of millet cultivation. They do not have less than three different species, kaz, foxtail millet, tanasu, broomcorn millet, and a third species, called ansü. Roemer called it sorghum millet. 2 / 8 The menu of the Kafirs . is not as unvaried as we supposed so far. There is bot [also: brenj], (4) a mash made from millet flour, fat [roghan, not a fluid here] and water. The flour also can be boiled with concentrated grape juice which would result in kumat. Then we hear of bean mash with and without nuts, dried sweet mulberries, apples and apricots, black and white grapes, of mura, the grape juice that is stored in clay pots. This is only juice, they hypocritically declare, as wine is forbidden for them as Muhammedans. Herrlich’s botanical renderings are those of an (enthusiastic) amateur. He particularly likes the Nuristani forests that remind him of his home country: And then the forest [in Kurder valley, Nuristan]. No poplar along a jui [the irrigation channels] but dense forest on the slope, tree next to tree, also for us a long-missing sight. This Pech valley is narrow and tight. Like a wall, the creek’s other bank is facing us. It is covered by bushy forest, up to some hundreds of metres. Now, towards the sunset, the valley’s bottom almost lies in shadow, but at the upper edge of the slope, lies the light of the evening sun. It falls on the rich dark green of the dots of the holly oaks (Quercus baloot) and breaks like in thousands of mirrors when the wind moves the small, spiny, waxen and shimmering leaves. Between the dark green, there is a delicate, yellow-greenish shimmer, bushes of the wild olive. Almost black loom the pointed pyramids of the conifers, some small cedars and firs. The Waigal valley has the most beautiful forests, according to Herrlich. He called the valley the “green heart of the Hindukush” and compared it with the Thuringian hills in Germany: We hike through a cedar forest. It surely has the most beautiful conifers we have ever seen: gigantic trunks with widely protruding, sagging branches. No brushwood, no undergrowth hinders our feet. The trees stand in large distances from each other, but over our heads, the branches merge into a dense roof. A dull green light fills the space. The steps are cushioned by the ground and the silence is solemn. Isn’t it like in the high forests of home? Only the small green parakeets do not fit into this picture. For two days, we hike through the conifer forests. Uphill, downhill. Herrlich’s book leaves it open whether his colleagues found the original wheat. (5) But the expedition brought home 4,000 seed samples and shoots of wild and cultivated plants as well as over 10,000 photographs, collections of minerals and insects and of taped songs, proverbs and poems of the local populations. Skulls and the path over the Pamirs As the subtitle of his book already indicated, Albert Herrlich was mainly interested in contributing to solve “the last riddle” of Central Asia, the ethno genesis, popular life and racial aspects of the Nuristani: “These are your brothers,” the Afghans told [earlier] travellers [exploring Nuristan/Kafiristan] and emphasised that the Kafirs [the old name given to the Nuristani by the Afghans, for their non- 3 / 8 Islamic religion] sit on chairs and drink wine. Early on, the assumption had been voiced that they were remainders of the original Aryans, and [the British author] Biddulph (6) located the home of the Aryan race to here. To look for Aryan traces became one of the overriding tasks of the expedition, as Herrlich admits. It also fitted into the political context. The expedition had indeed been pushed for two other reasons by the Nazi German government. One was its interest in ‘race studies,’ a subject popular not only in Nazi Germany, as the Herrlich quote shows. But looking for the origins of the ‘Aryans’ – originally a linguistic category for the southeastern (Iranian) wing of the Indo-European (formerly: Indo-Aryan) language family that morphed into a ‘racial’ term – was not innocent research any more; it had become part of a theory that divided humankind into ‘humans’ and ‘sub-humans’ (as early as in the 1920s), with the latter to be eliminated. With the Holocaust and the genocides against Sinti, Roma and Slavonians, it became murderous practice. Herrlich describes in his book how he and other participants of the expedition took craniometrical measurements of the Nuristani, this era’s ‘racial sciences’ yardstick, used to divide people into valuable Aryans and inferior non-Aryans. The expedition members measured 250 Nuristani, and Herrlich expressed his hope that he could add the soldiers of the Nuristani army company in Kabul to his pool. He summarises: But already during the collecting work, one gains a general idea about of what kind the final result will be and in which direction they will go. He finds three categories among the people measured: “small people with all features of a primitive human race,” a medium-sized group “with dark hair and a strongly protruding, curved nose,” which he describes as belonging to the “Armenian race,” and a “third Kafir type . tall, with blond hair and blue eyes. Would one put a Kafir of this type into other clothes and bring him to Germany, he would not stand out the least. Yes, one would probably perceive him as a typical Tyrolean or Upper Bavarian.” He also draws a link from the Nuristani back to the “old Aryan conqueror peoples” that invaded India in the third and second millennium BC.