The Perniciousness of War

Most lives on earth have been changed by war. I have no statistics, but even your own life probably bears the marks of warfare. Looking back at your family history, you may well find a time when your ancestors had to absorb the impact of war – land left behind, assets disappeared, or family lost – with consequences that have a long tail. Even now, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, rising gas prices and other impacts are causing adjustments all over this interconnected world.[1] War can be very pernicious, its ripple effects seeping into nooks and crannies in ways we might not even be aware.

Take Sayyida Salme’s experience when she lost her husband. It happened after only three years of marriage, while she was still deep in her culture and conversion shock,[2] a young mother of three young children born back-to-back. In Letters to the Homeland, she preceded the long description of her husband’s death with a short description of the onset of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870.[3] She described it as a tumultuous time, but likely more than she realized. Was she able to connect the dots?

In this tumultuous time of war between Germany and France, I was struck, as you know, by the greatest tragedy of my life. … (Letters, p. 42)

For this is what happened: My husband was on the way home, returning from his sick father, on the horse tram. When he got to the end of the line, which was still a ways from our home, he jumped, as is unfortunately the habit of all gentlemen here, from the open platform in the front and fell with such disadvantage that he was gripped by the still-moving tram and—overrun! (Letters, p. 45)

In fact, she probably could not see the link that we can see today – with particular thanks to Fridjof Gutendorf for his probing research in multiple archives. What she did not write, and likely did not know, but what Fridjof Gutendorf realized as he pored over archival material, is that her husband Heinrich did not just have a tragic accident. He actually got on the wrong tram. He was halfway home when the tram went right instead of left. He realized his error and fatefully jumped off.

And why the error? It was wartime!

Still early days in the fighting, Germany was mobilizing its forces. The war started on July 19, and the accident occurred on July 29.[4] Most horses had been commandeered to the front, which left this new form of transport, introduced only three years earlier, in disarray. It was not Heinrich who was confused – the trams were confused! Or so it seems. War brought Heinrich’s life to an all-the-more tragic conclusion.

In an instant, Sayyida Salme’s life was forever changed by this very short war. But it did not stop there. Even after Heinrich’s death, even after the end of the war, the losses kept mounting:

As we say here, misfortune rarely comes alone. This also seemed to apply in my case. Even as I was still oppressed by my mental stupor, I was confronted with the bleak news that the export business between Hamburg and Zanzibar was in dire straits as a consequence of the German-French war, and we could expect great losses. On top of that, my husband’s agent in Zanzibar, a friend from his youth and the son of a senior pastor in Hamburg, had shown a very deficient understanding of “mine and thine,” and so I had to anticipate the worst. This disloyal agent tried to enrich himself as quickly as possible at the expense of the widow and fatherless children of his deceased friend, against which the Hamburg-based liquidator of my husband’s business was unable to exercise any effective control. (Letters, p. 60)

More wartime stresses – and thus began her descent into dire financial straits, a severe and compounded financial blow against which she, especially as a woman, could do nothing.[5]

But there is even more. A generation earlier, we can see that war was destiny for her mother as well. It was a warring Russia that made her mother Djilfidan into a slave – a surie (concubine) – as part of the hundred-year Circassian genocide. Even at the age of four or five, she had value as a future “Circassian Beauty.”[6] This prospect no doubt saved her life, but also landed her in Zanzibar, more than 3000 miles away, bereft of home and family, off in another hemisphere. As Sayyida Salme recounts:

My mother, a Circassian by birth, was torn from her homeland already at a young age. She had been living peacefully with her father, mother, and two siblings on the family farm. Then war broke out, marauding bands rampaged across the land, and the whole family fled to an underground location …. A wild horde penetrated even this refuge. They struck down the father and mother, and then three Arnauts galloped off with the three siblings. The one with her older brother soon disappeared from view. The two others with my mother and her three-year-old sister, who could not stop crying for her mother, stayed together until nightfall when they, too, separated. My mother never heard anything more of her siblings. (Memoirs, p. 7)

Even in the case of Sayyida Salme’s father, it was apparently war that took the ultimate toll. There may be other theories of Sayyid Said bin Sultan’s death,[7] but here is her description:

Our dear father is no longer! On this trip from Oman to Zanzibar, amidst but a few of his children and faithful followers, he had been called to meet the Lord, whom he had always served with the greatest humility! The gunshot wound to his leg, that had plagued him for so long, had finally put an end to his precious life. (Memoirs, p. 82)

This was not just any bullet, but a casualty of war. Referring to her childhood, she recalled that: 

He limped a little. A bullet from the war, lodged in his thigh and a frequent source of pain, hindered the gait of this strong man. (Memoirs, p. 9)

War is also the reason why my own branch of the family lost some of its historical Omani artefacts. Sayyida Salme’s youngest daughter Rosa was still living in Jena, Germany, at the end of World War II. To join the rest of her family – including my grandmother – in their crowded emergency lodgings near Frankfurt, Rosa had to switch from the Russian zone to the American zone. It was not easy, but she succeeded because a letter of support came from America, a letter from Friedrich Oechsner, who was then the husband of her niece, Olga, the daughter of her son Rudolph. In this way, even though Rosa had to leave things behind, at least the war did not keep the family apart.[8] 

It was but one year later – seventy-seven years ago this very day – that Harry Truman signed the North Atlantic Treaty based on “peaceful principles.” As he said then: “It is possible for nations to achieve unity on the great principles of human freedom and justice, and at the same time to permit … the greatest diversity of which the human mind is capable. … For us, war is not inevitable. … If there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.”[9]

Would Truman still say that today? Can we regain peace and prosperity – even as reckless aggression expands into our lives – so that the perniciousness of war may ultimately fade into the ever more distant past?

Let history surprise you, let her story inspire you – let her authentic voice speak to you.

Andrea Emily Stumpf, April 4, 2026

Photo credit: From an article by Matthias Schmoock, “So fuhr die erste Strassenbahn in Hamburg” in the Hamburger Abendblatt, August 13, 2016 (photo credit Hochbahn).

[1] An interesting list of ripple effects after just one month appeared in “How the Iran War Has Rippled Across the World,” The New York Times (March 29, 2026).

[2] Sayyida Salme fled Zanzibar in 1866 to be with her husband and then converted from Islam to Christianity to marry him in 1867, before moving to Hamburg and starting a family there.

[3] Letters, pp. 41-43. See also my prior blog post on “War That Is Simply Satanic” from March 20, 2026.

[4] Word lovers may appreciate that the etymology of the German word for accident – Unfall – is a bad fall, derived from fallanan, meaning "to drop from a height, fall, or die." Taking it a step deeper, according to one Reddit site, the derivation of “gefallen” (to please) from “fallen” (to fall) is also evident in the relationship between “happiness” and “happen” – a fortuitous coming together as opposed to a bad fall.

[5] See my blog post “A Woman's Power of the Purse” from June 17, 2024.

[6] The convergence of victimized Circassian females on the market and thriving harem practice was not incidental, as one enabled the other. Here from a description of the Turkish harem: “It is well known that most of the ladies in the harems of the Turkish Sultans were Circassians, the Circassian girls being very much esteemed on account of their beauty and being consequently very expensive.” F. McCullagh, The Fall of Abd-ul-Hamid, p. 276 (1910).

[7] At least one account says he knew he was going to die and had coffin boards brought on board for the trip. Another account says it was part wound, part dysentery. Considering how much his son Barghash wanted to claim the throne, it is not unthinkable that he played a part as well.

[8] For more on Friedrich Oechsner, see Frederick Cable Oechsner - Wikipedia. Rosa died not long thereafter in 1948. Antonie, Sayyida Salme’s other daughter, had already died in the British bombing of Bad Oldesloe near Hamburg in 1945, another consequence of war.

[9] With thanks to Heather Cox Richardson for drawing my attention to these words in her newsletter from April 3, 2026, quoting from Harry S. Truman’s speech on April 4, 1949.