“We Found Her at the River”

Abstract This article focuses on the discursive and practical strategies of German humanitarian work on behalf of Ottoman Armenians in the Eastern Mediterranean beginning in the 1890s. Unlike their British, French, and US counterparts, German humanitarians, restrained by their government’s pro-Ottoman politics, relied on mobilization and funding strategies that catered to an evangelical moral counterpublic. Pious journalism and educational efforts focused on individual stories and suffering and catered to both popular reading preferences and a devout audience, generating particular humanitarian fantasies, namely the pursuit of salvation through the rescue of distant others. These fantasies provided the raw material for the construction of an imagined humanitarian community solidified by an individualized one-to-one child sponsorship system involving the circulation of letters, photographs, blessings, moral instructions, and money. The donations of this pious Protestant counterpublic enabled the establishment of an enduring humanitarian project with the hallmarks of modern humanitarianism; it was international, bureaucratic, and perceived as permanent. The largely neglected German humanitarian efforts reveal the continuities between a post–World War I secular, permanent, institutionalized, solution-oriented humanitarian regime and the religious, supposedly “sporadic” missionary humanitarianism of the 19th century, as its established practices carried over into and inspired the work of the interwar period.