"On the brink of World War I, Germany was often depicted as an evil puppetmaster manipulating the Ottoman Empire. Behind closed doors, however, the Ottomans worked hard to exploit their alliance with Germany as a means of reviving the empire's former strength and glory. Ultimately these cross-purposes brought disaster, pulling a fatally weak and woefully unprepared Ottoman state into a global war, and unleashing vicious, internal ethnic repression that brought it defeat and dismemberment. The diaries and official reports of German spy and propagandist Curt Prüfer--translated into English in their entirety for the first time--chronicle the complexities of the fragile Ottoman-German alliance. Much like fellow soldier-scholar T.E. Lawrence, Prüfer and his colleagues tried to steal the loyalties of the Muslim subjects of the opposing sides. The book explores these episodes of sabotage, subversion and subterfuge and sheds light onto the ways World War I played out across the Middle East. Complemented by in-depth and meticulously researched notes, this primary source collection is an invaluable addition to the extant corpus of late Ottoman and World War I historical documents."--