German Refugees in Turkey

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The Unlikely Architects of Modern Turkish National Identity?: The Case of

German Refugees from the Third Reich (1933 – 1972)

By

Pelin Kadercan

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

Of theRequirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by

Professor Celia Applegate

Department of HistoryArts, Sciences and Engineering

School of Arts and Sciences

University of RochesterRochester, New York

2012


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Curriculum Vitae

The author was born in Istanbul, Turkey on the second of September, 1975. She attended

Bosphorus University from 1995 to 2000, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree

in Educational Sciences – Guidance and Psychological Counseling in 1999. She was

awarded a Master of Science in European Politics and International Relations in 2003.

She came to the University of Rochester in the Fall of 2004 and began a doctoral program

in European and global history. She received the Dean’s Graduate Fellowship between2004 and 2008 at the University of Rochester. She pursued her research in exiles from

Nazi Germany to Turkey, the history of nationalism, national identity, education and

music under the direction of Professor Celia Applegate. She received various

scholarships and awards, while she completed her coursework at the University of

Rochester. In 2006, her second year paper was selected as the best paper written and

presented among graduate students at the Department of History and received the

William F. Harkins Jr. Memorial and Egon Berlin Prizes. In 2007, she received the Lina

and A. William Salomone Prize for outstanding work done in European cultural and

intellectual history. She was chosen to receive the Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship for the

2009-10 academic year, which greatly facilitated the research necessary for this

dissertation.


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Acknowledgments

I am sincerely and heartily grateful to my advisor, Dr. Celia Applegate, for the

support and guidance she showed me throughout my dissertation writing. Her expertise,

wisdom, and understanding added considerably to my graduate experience. I would like

to thank the other members of my committee, Dr. Lynn Gordon, and Dr. Jean Elisabeth

Pedersen for the assistance they provided at all levels of the research project and writing.

Dr. Gordon showed enthusiasm and believed in this project from the first moment that I

mentioned it to her. I doubt that I will ever be able to convey my appreciation fully, but I

owe her my eternal gratitude.

I would also like to thank my family for the support they provided me through my

entire life and in particular, I must acknowledge my husband and best friend, Burak,

without whose love and encouragement, I would not have finished this thesis. My

grandmother, Rabia Gümüşgerdan, was the first one to tell me about the German émigrés

at the institutes of higher education in Turkey. In the late 1930s, she, herself, acted as a

research assistant to Dr. Fritz Arndt at Istanbul University. I thank my mother, Emine

Müveddet Gümüşgerdan foracting as my research assistant at the archives in Istanbul

and Ankara in 2009 and 2010, and for being the most supportive mother.

The families, friends, and students of émigrés were extremely generous with their

time and information, giving me interviews, photographs, and memoirs. They include

Hermann Fuchs, Frances Güterbock, Dr. Süheyla Artemel, Dr. Yasar Karayalçin, and Dr. Feridun Aksoy. Other people who assisted me in various important ways while I was

completing the dissertation include Dr. Rıfat Bali, Ahmet Say, Dr. Ferit Özşen, Dr. Ferda

Keskin, Dr. Mete Tunçay, and Dr. Ali Uçan.


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Moreover, I want to thank my colleagues and friends at the University of

Rochester, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and

Randolph-Macon College whose comments on my work have improved my thinking on

the subject of migration. In particular, Dr. Mine Eren, Dr. Holly Shissler, Dr. Craig

Nakashian, Kira Thurman, and Dan Franke showed great encouragement and support.

Above all, I must acknowledge that the fascinating personalities and enormous

contribution of these émigrés to humanism have been the greatest source of inspiration to

me.

Finally, I am dedicating this dissertation to my son Batu, for giving me thestrength and motivation to complete it.


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Abstract

The late 1920s and 1930s were a crucial moment in the state-directed modernization of

Turkey, because it was the moment in which the Kemalists turned to the implementation

of cultural reforms in every field from arts to clothing. This moment of state-led

modernization coincided, not entirely by accident – after all, the same mega-historical

forces of war and postwar reconstruction served to launch the Kemalists and the National

Socialists into power, in very different ways – with the availability of a wide range of

exiles from Nazi Germany. This dissertation argues that the coincidence of these two

forces — state-directed cultural modernization and state-generated exile of cultural

talent — created the conditions for a far-reaching transformation of the institutions of

Turkish cultural life. The confluence of the two groups in history – modernist exiles who

fled Nazi Germany and Kemalists in Turkey – led to a drastic change in the institutions of

Turkish culture. The émigré intellectuals and artists diligently helped the new Republic

establish its cultural infrastructure, brought ideas, techniques and organizational

experience to their new home, trained a generation of artists, musicians, and teachers to

function as creators and arbiters of the new public taste in Turkey. The effect of the

German professors was felt in all spheres of higher education, but in music and arts the

extent of modernization was especially notable. Nation-building through music and the

arts, seemingly a rather innocuous aspect of the Kemalist project, has become instead oneof the most controversial of all its aspects almost from the start and increasingly so in

recent decades. Even while the German émigrés contributed significantly to the success

of Kemalist nation- building, a strong resentment against the émigrés, the so-called


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“foreign imports” with their elite state sponsorship and their rigid cultural policies, also

hindered the Kemalist project — and in the long term contributed to the backlash against

it. This cultural transformation, nevertheless, constitutes one of the most striking

examples of the power that transnational networks and influences have to re-shape

existing social, political, and cultural norms.


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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Turkish Nation Building in a Transnational Context 37

Chapter 2 Language Reform and the Reconstructionof Humanities Education in Turkey 57

Chapter 3 The Construction of Modern Turkish Music, National Identity and Eduard Zuckmayer (1890 – 1972) 97

Chapter 4 Modern Turkish Visual Arts, National Identity

and Rudolf Belling (1886 – 1972) 120

Chapter 5 Conclusion 150

Bibliography 160

Appendices 192


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Introduction

In the 1930s, fleeing persecution by the Nazis, hundreds of German Jewish

professionals found a safe haven in Turkey.1

Ironically, the refugees, who lost their

German citizenship due to their “racial” background, proved of great use to the young

Turkish Republic in its nation- building project, precisely because of their “German”

heritage and expertise. Some refugees were appointed leaders of state-directed cultural

institutions; some institutions , such as the “StateTheatre Conservatory ,” were actually

founded under their guidance or leadership. Others established university departments

from scratch, even making decisions about the structural organization of academic

departments at major universities. The effect of the German professors was felt in all

spheres of higher education, but especially in music, arts, and humanities education. The

Kemalist intelligentsia wanted to communicate their secular modernizing values through

painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, and used the German émigré scholars to

achieve their goals. This dissertation focuses on the role of German émigré scholars and professionals in the making of the modern Turkish nation through the transnational

circulation of people, ideas, and institutions. Émigrés, the majority of whom were Jewish

Germans, put their distinctive stamp on Turkish cultural institutions but they in turn were

shaped and changed by their experience of Turkish society and culture. Locating the

experience of exile within the context of early Republican Turkish cultural history, the

dissertation shows that the émigrés fitted very well in the Kemalist project of

modernization and nation- building project and willingly became part of “Atatürk’s

1 For a description and analysis of the German exiles during the Hitler era, see Sabine Hillebrecht, Haymatlos: Exile in der Türkei 1933 – 1945 (Berlin: Verein Aktives Museum, 2000).


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Turkey”- a term they tended to use in their writings to distinguish the young Turkish

Republic from Ottoman Turkey.

The émigré scholars profoundly influenced Turkish society, culture, and

institutions for two reasons. First, in the 1930s, only a few institutions of higher

education existed in Turkey, and the country lacked the necessary expertise to establish

such institutions and train professionals. State administrators, especially those at the top

of the hierarchy, including Kemal Atat ürk himself, were well aware of the country’s

needs in higher education, the arts, and culture. Second, the émigrés arrived at a critical

time. Kemal Atat ürk and his cadre started implementing cultural reforms in the late1920s, so modernization in higher education had just begun. In 1928, the young republic

renamed the Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi , (the School of Fine Arts in Arabic) the major art

institute, Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi (the School of Fine Arts in Turkish). The

transformation of Dar- ül - fünun (University in Arabic) into Istanbul Universitesi (Istanbul

University in Turkish) followed the restructuring of the School of Fine Arts in Istanbul. A

majority of professors at Dar- ül - fünun were dismissed from their jobs, replaced by

German émigré scholars and intellectuals. Large cities in Turkey were the scene of this

cultural transformation, especially Ankara, the newly established capital of the young

republic.

The profound influence of German émigré scholars, artists, and intellectuals also

led to the establishment of universities, as well as arts and music training institutes in

Ankara. Most of these scholars and artists were Jews or radicals or both, outsiders in their

own nation. Germany accused these artists and intellectuals of being rootless

internationalists, so the architects of change became its victims. Most of thes e émigrés


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saw themselves as the vanguard of an internationalist spirit, and consequently they

assumed an increasingly critical stance toward material traditions that excluded them. 2

Their cosmopolitan modernism and involuntary status as outsiders in Germany helps to

explain their flexibility, adaptability, intelligence, and integrity in their new destinations.

As Anthony Heilbut wrote, “If Hitler exiled nearly forty-three percent of all

German academics, he depleted the stock of social scientists even further – almost half,

forty- seven percent lost their positions and immigrated abroad.”3 Some of these well-

established social scientists, for example the economist Fritz Neumark (1900 – 1991) and

professor of constitutional law Ernst Hirsch (1902 – 1985), both of them JewishGermans, served Turkey both as professors and as architects of social and cultural

change. Despite their contribution to Turkish modernization and nation-building project,

few monographs exist about the German exiles, including the Jewish-German exiles and

their exilic experience in Turkey.

By the 1930s, the Republican elite thought the nation building project still faced

two important challenges: The first was to disseminate nationalist ideas to the populace in

Anatolia, which the Kemalist cadres considered “an unfinished project.” The second was

to communicate to the wi der world that Turkey, with its modern culture, was “civilized”

enough to belong to a “family of nations”. The Turkish elite wanted to attain international

recognition particularly throug h the nation’s arts and music. 4 Kemal Atatürk associated

2 Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the1930s to the Present (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 21.3 Heilbut, “Intellectuals’ Migration: The Émigré's Conquest of American Academia,”Change 16, no. 5(July – Aug. 1984): 24-5.4 The Treaty of Paris (1856) gave the Sublime Porte a kind of provisional admission into European society.Yet, in the words of one early twentieth century scholar of international law, “her position as a member ofthe Family of Nations was anomalous, becaus e her civilization fell short of that of Western states.” HedleyBull (1984) argues that the declining power of religious authority, increased contact with peoples of non-European descent, and the ascendant of positivist legal conceptions led European nations to re-define the


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the construc tion of a national music and arts with the new regime’s aspiration to join

twentieth century western civilization. 5 Among a number of advisors from Europe and

the US, for example, the Turkish government invited Paul Hindemith to advise them in

creating modern Turkish music and music education. Hindemith, similar to other

displaced people from Nazi Germany, was modernist, secular, non-sectarian, rational,

and in nearly every way an heir to the Enlightenment in his cultural work. Not unlike

many Kemalists of the day, he was an ardent progressivist pedagogue, who believed that

he could change people through reforms. Hindemith blended German folk styles with

modernist ones in his music, which made him an excellent advisor for the Kemalists.Following Gökalp’s pr onounced ideas about what music should sound like and how it

should represent Turkishness, Kemal Atatürk himself wanted Turkish national music to

be a blend of genuine Turkish folk and western classical music.

The late 1920s and 1930s were a crucial moment in the state-directed

modernization of Turkey and not only in music, because it was the moment in which the

Kemalists turned to the implementation of cultural reforms in every field from visual arts

to clothing. This moment of state-led modernization coincided, not entirely by accident –

after all, the same mega-historical forces of war and postwar reconstruction served to

launch the Kemalists and the National Socialists into power, in very different ways – with

conditions under which they would or would not admit non-European political communities to membershipof the international society they formed among themselves. Thus arose the idea that independent politicalcommunities aspiring to membership of international society had to mee t a standard of “civilization.” Bythe turn of the twentieth century, the “law of Christian nations” had beenslightly altered and largelyredefined as the “law of civilized natio ns.” The principle divided the world into three categories: civilized,semi-civilized and barbaric. Until World War II, this standard of civilization played three roles ininternational affairs: a legal framework, a sorting mechanism to judge peoples and states, and a hegemonicideal. For a detailed analysis of what the term implies see Hedley Bull, Foreword, in: Gerrit Gong, TheStandard of 'Civilization' in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 5 In 1934, Kemal Atatürk asked Ahmet Adnan Saygun, a prominent Turkish composer in Western classicalmusic, to compose the Özsoy Opera to honor his guest, Shah Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. Western in itsmusic, this opera had nationalist connotations and celebrated the brotherhood of the Turkish and Iranian

people.


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the availability of a wide range of exiles from Nazi Germany. This dissertation will argue

that the coincidence of these two forces — state-directed cultural modernization and state-

generated exile of cultural talent — created the conditions for a far-reaching

transformation of the institutions of Turkish cultural life.

Turkish Modernization and Nation Building

The decade after the end of World War I had been a breaking point in the social,

cultural, and political history of Turkey because it was during the post-war reconstruction

that Kemal Atatürk, the charismatic and victorious leader of the War of Independence,was able to establish a new regime completely based on Western values in cultural life.

Fueled by the need to modernize and westernize and building upon the European –

especially French and German – style (and Gökalp inspired)6 notions of nationalism,

Kemalist elites pursued a series of nation-building strategies on two levels, those of

destruction and of replacement. Characterized by a mindset that equated Islam with

backwardness, Atatürk’s nationalism sought elimination of Islam not only from politics

but also social and cultural life.

With the help of German émigrés, the Republican cadre shaped formal citizenship

rights and modern institutions and had achieved great success increasing the “new Turk.”

This person was proud of his unique (and imagined) Turkish heritage, a defender of the

Republican values of democracy and secularism, modern, fairly well educated, and

enlightened . The segments of society sufficiently exposed to the nationalist/Republican

agenda of the new Turkish state had become “true believers”. However, the number of

6 Considere d as the intellectual founder of the Turkish nation, Ziya Gökalp (1876 – 1924) was a writer,sociologist and political activist. His work was influential in shaping Kemalism in its early stages.


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“new Turks” was fairly limited because at least two social groups fell outside the “new

Turk” classification. First, a significant portion of the population, mostly residing in

distant rural areas, could not be part of the state’s “modernization program” so far as both

industrialization/urbanization and ideological transformation were concerned. To this

segment, the new Turks were almost as foreign as Westerners. For the so-called new

Turks, on the other hand, these groups c onstituted an “unfinished project”, people to be

educated and enlightened.

A second and politically aware group of people, urban dwellers who had access to

education had been transformed by the rapid changes in society and economy, werecloser to the impact of nation-building strategies of the Republic, but apparently not close

enough in their ideology. These people reacted against the processes of national

modernization and Westernization. For this group Western values conflicted with Islamic

norms and id eals and traditional [Turkish] ways of life. The universities’ occupation by

gavurs (infidels) or yabanc ılar (foreigners) created fierce resentment among them. Thus

they developed a reactionary stance against state policies such as the banning of

headscarves from the public realm, the prohibition of singing ezan (call to prayer) in

Arabic, or westernization in music, arts, and education. 7 In time, this second group

developed an alternative national identity. While not disputing their “Turkishness” or

denying the economic benefits of industrialization and modernity, their alternative to

Kemalist identity rejected many of the national characteristics, particularly the “Westerningredients,” that defined the New Turk. For these people, the Republican ideology

7 One of the first actions taken by the Democratic Party (DP), which came to power in 1950 after the firstmulti-party elections in Turkey was held, was to bring Arabic ezan back. After ten years of rule, the partywas prosecuted to the fullest by the Armed Forces, who forced the DP out of office. The prime minister andtwo other cabinet members were put on trial and executed. The Armed Forces justified their actions byclaiming that the DP was abusing Islam and had intentions of destroying secularism in Turkey.


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undermined and even negated the role of religion and traditional values in social and

political life. Members of this group maintained that Islam was an indispensable

component of Turkish national identity. Since the first group mentioned above, that is,

the segments of society remaining largely unaffected by the ideological strategies of the

Republic, had traditionally upheld a religious world-view, the politically-aware Islamists

related to them more extensively or effectively than the Kemalists. In time, segments of

society not transformed to the “ideal” set by the Kemalists formed a coalition, identifying

itself as opposed to the ideal new Turk of Kemalism. The result was ongoing friction and

duality in Turkish society, both culturally and politically. In short, the state’s efforts tocreate the “new Turk,” at times both oppressive and repressive, also created its antithesis:

a reactionary identity, that is, reactionary to the Kemalist understanding of the ideal

Turkish nation.

The traditional segments of the society welcomed economic transformation and

progress in science and technology, but they found efforts to westernize music, arts,

humanities education, and language incompatible with their Islamic values. Nation-

building through music and the arts, seemingly a rather innocuous aspect of the Kemalist

project, became instead one of the most controversial of all its aspects. Thus even while

the German émigrés contributedsignificantly to the success of Kemalist nation-building,

a strong resentment aga inst the émigrés, the so-called “foreign imports”with their elite

state sponsorship and their rigid cultural policies, also hindered the Kemalist project —

and in the long term contributed to the backlash against it.


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Exile in a Transnational Context

Given the enormous scale of exile by the end of the twentieth century, some

scholars have argued that the experience of displacement, homelessness, and forced

migration has been a defining aspect of modernity, even a constitutive one. 8 In the 1930s,

many Germans were displaced from their native land, contributing to another form of

displacement in Turkey. For example, Zuckmayer’s collection of folk music from

Anatolia and incorporporation of Turkish folk into western classical music in an urban

setting constituted a cultural displacement. Yet this kind of displacement was

constructive; and contributed to the development of modern Turkish music.The contribution of exiles to the modernization process in their new homes

constitutes a paradox because of the migration experience itself. Highlighting the loss of

something left behind, at times forever, Edward Said, an exile himself, wrote, “If true

exile is a permanent loss, then how could we depict it as a potent, even enriching motif of

modern culture?” The answer for Said lay in the modern period itself; he perceived it as a

period of anxiety and estrangement, spiritually orphaned and alienated. 9 Nevertheless

and at the same time, refugees and émigrés have created a large part of modern Western

culture; it is, to a significant degree, a work done in exile. Sophia McClennen elaborates

on the etymology of the three words exile, refugee, and émigré in The Dialectics of Exile-

Nation, Time, Language, and Space in Hispanic Literatures . By putting the exile

experience within the context of repressive authoritarian regimes in Latin America, she

marks its complex and contradictory nature. Exile reflects two intertwined and

inseparable historical transformations- those of nationalization and globalization. As

8 Peter Fritzsche, “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity,”The American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 2001): 1587-618. 9 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,”Granta 13 (Autumn, 1984): 160.


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exiles encounter new national spaces in their everyday lives, they experience culture as

something displaced from territorial space. 10 Through the process of displacement, that

place belongs no longer to the local but to the global. That is exactly the point in which

transnationalism as a category of analysis enters the picture. 11 Perhaps Zuckmayer would

not act as boldly as he did while displacing Turkish folk music from its local Anatolia

had he not experienced his own displacement from Germany.

Moreover, the cultural production of exiles transcends national boundaries; and

by doing so, they draw their identity not merely from national, but from other identities

such as political ideology, gender, race, class, or sexuality. During his teaching atBoğaziçi University, Fuchs always emphasized the work of German humanists in his

classes; and in his paintings he mostly focused on rural Turkey. Fuchs’s poems,

paintings, and teaching drew on his political views and last but not least, his

homosexuality. Fuchs’s experiencein Turkey helped him voice his cosmopolitan mindset

and concerns about Nazi Germany through his cultural work at a place far away from his

Heimat that he missed but promised never to return to.

Indeed, starting from the 19 th century, the exilic experience suggests a shift in

historical consciousness because of its work in creating a history beyond the boundaries

of the nation-state: the exile is the ultimate embodiment of spiritual and mental

displacement in the modern age. And that displacement in turn could find expression in

other forms of cultural displacements and formed transnational spaces and cosmopolitan

ideas across Europe.

10 McClennen, 32.11 Transnationalism acts as a category of analysis to question the dominant position of the nation-state as aunit of territorial and administrative organization. See Jennifer Jenkins, “Transnationalism and GermanHistory,” H-German Discussion Log , January 2006.


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Modernity, Jews, and the German Exile to Turkey

The presence of political exiles in Turkey was not a new phenomenon. Networks

of political exiles from the 1848 Revolution were the first to create a shared space of

information across Europe – Zürich, London, Paris, Istanbul, Madrid – in the modern

sense. 12 The Ottoman Empire became a major refuge for those Christians and Jews who

fled the suppression of the liberal revolutions of 1848. The émigrés from the Habsburg

Empire and Germany to the east formed transnational networks with a cosmopolitan

mindset that did not regard the nation-state as the ultimate goal of history, but simply as

the best framework in which progressive forces could establish a free, democratic andegalitarian society. 13 The exile movements of the nineteenth century, however, were not

mass movements; the tens of thousands of political refugees in the 1850s formed a very

small group when compared with the millions of displaced persons in Europe after the

two total wars or the population exchanges that accompanied the redrawing of the map of

12 Michael L. Miller, “From liberal nationalism to cosmopolitan patriotism: Simon Deutsch and 1848ers inExile,” European Review of History 17, no. 3 (Jun 2010): 380. For a different case of 1848ers in exile, seeJohn Belchem, “Nationalism, Republicanism and Exile: Irish Emigrants and the Revolutions of 1848,” Past& Present , no. 146 (Feb.1995): 103-135. Interestingly, Irish nationalists abroad enjoyed greater successthan their compatriots at home, eliciting a fervour for the nationalist cause in 1848 largely absent in Irelanditself. For more on German political exiles in 1848 also see, Adolf E. Zucker, The Forty-Eighters: Political

Refugees of the German Revolution of 1848 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Herbet Reiter, Political Asylum im 19 JahrHundert: die Deutschen Politischen Fluchtinge des Vormarz und der Revolution von 1848/49 in Europa und den USA (Berlin: Duncher und Humboldt) and Christine Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain 1840-1860 (London; New York: Routledge, 2006).Political exile constitutes the lion’s share of scholarly study on German immigration but it is important tonote that in Britain by 1852, Germans immigrating for economic reasons, among them waiters, tailors,sugar bakers far outnumbered the political émigré community of 1848ers, see Panikos Panyani,German

Immigrants in Britain during the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914 (Oxford: Berg, 1995) and Mack Walker,Germany and the Emigration, 1816-1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).13 Miller, 379-393.


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Europe in the twentieth century. 14 Migration historian Jochan Oltmer concluded that

political exile in the nineteenth century remained the fate of the individual. 15

Jews escaping from 1848 revolutions contributed in deep and lasting ways to the

formation of transnational networks. Undoubtedly, the Jewish experience constitutes an

important part in the historical consciousness of displacement both before and after

1848. 16 Jews have been the unwanted in the modern world, and they have also been

associated with the very modernity that aimed to displace them from their native places

across Europe. Identifying Jews with modernity, Yuri Slezkine, in the Jewish Century

(2004), argues that the Jews positioned themselves as agents of modernity. Their positionas outsiders made them even more successful as “mercurial-entrepreneurial minorities.”17

They were “mercurial” because they were strangers, and by being strangers they could

position themselves as agents of change more easily than other groups. Peter Gay counts

numerous Jewish intellectuals and artists among the liberal layer of German society

responsible for producing Weimar culture; they are the “outsiders propelled by history

inside.”18 Indeed, the most influential (in the long-run) left-wing intellectuals in Weimar

14 Jochan Oltmer, “Flucht, Vertreibung und Asyl im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” IMIS Beitrage (2002: 2):107- 08 in Helena Toth, “Émigrés: The Experience of Political Exile for Germans and Hungarians, 1948-1871” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008) in Proquest Dissertations and Theses Online .15 Oltmer, 108 in Toth.16The modern period started with an expansion of economic and political opportunities for Jews, but also

brought a reversal of the process after two or three generations. While the Jew became a full citizen of hisnative land in Western Europe, the advances of the Jews were spurned and their cooperation rejected by asubstantial number of people. See Solomon Grayzel, A History of the Jews- From the Destruction of Judah

in 586 BC to the Present Arab Israeli Conflict (Chicago: The Jewish Publication of Society of America,1968), 487. The Jews, the new anti-Semitic [European] politician insisted, had no capacity for participationin modern culture; on the contrary, they were a menace to it because of th eir inherent “racial” traits. See

Encylopedia Brittanica 12, (1970): 1073. For the situation of the Jews in Europe, also see Michael Brenner, A Short History of the Jews (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010), 83-117; for a comparativestudy on the situation of Jews in Europe and the Ottoman Empire see Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of theOttoman Empire and Turkish Republic (London: MacMillan Academic and Professional Ltd., 1991), 3-109.17 Slezkine, The Jewish Century (New York: Princeton University Press, 2004), 17.18 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), xiv.


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Germany belonged to the so-called Frankfurt School, all of whose principal members

came from middle class Jewish homes. 19 Perhaps as agents of change, like Indians in

Mozambique, Jews were admired but envied and resented at the same time.

In 1933, that antisemitic resentment found its most radical expression with the

Nazis’ ascent to power and the same year, the Reestablishment of Professional Civil

Service Law in Germany institutionalized it. In its most general intent, the law aimed at

reshaping the entire government bureaucracy in order to ensure its loyalty to the new

regime. Applying to more than two million state and municipal employees, the

exclusionary measures of the law were directed against the politically unreliable, mainlycommunists and other opponents of the Nazis, and against Jews. 20 In 1935, the Jews were

left outside the national community through the Nuremberg Laws. According to the

citizenship law, only those of German or related blood could be citizens. This law turned

Jews into “subjects” having in fact a status similar to that of foreigners. “Race

specialists” assigned by Hitler to underpin a racial-biological anti-Jewish legislation and

the party insisted on the most comprehensive definition of the Jew, one that would have

equated even “quarter Jews” with full Jews.21

The Jews were not the only group unwelcome in the newly defined German

national community; not all those fleeing Hitler ’s regime were Jews. 22 Hitler’s first

victims were left-wing radicals and intellectuals. The Nazis considered modernist artists

19 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 86.20 Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York: Harper-Perennial, 2009), 11. Thelaw defined “non-Aryan” as “anyone descended from non-Aryan, particularly Jewish, parents orgrandparents. It suffices if one parent or grandparent is non- Aryan.” 21 For more information on anti-Jewish laws and what Hitler announced at the Nuremberg Party Congress,see Friedlander, 48-54.22 Peter Gay, “The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany,” in Driven into Paradise , eds. ReinholdBrinkmann and Christoph Wolff (L.A: University of California Press, 1999), 22.


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“degenerate” no matter what their ethnicity or religion.23 In art, modernism embodied the

problem of racial decline. To be a Jew, a radical, and a modernist constituted an

enormous threat to the Aryan-German race. De-Judaization of cultural life in Germany

started as early as Hitler’s accession to power on January 30, 1933. Among thousands,

who fled Nazi Germany were, for example, the conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno

Walter. Hans Hinkel, the new president of the Prussian Theater Commission and the

official in charge of the “de-Judaization” in cultural life in Prussia, explained in the

Frankfurter Zeitung of April 6 that Klemperer and Walter had disappeared from the

political scene since no one could protect them from the “mood” of a German public long provoked by “Jewish artistic liquidators.”24 The Nazis also established a link between

modern art and the Jews’ “control” of the media prior to the Third Reich. The Nazis

argued that Jews had intentionally duped the German people into embracing

nontraditional aesthetic styles and thus dominated the art market, reaping huge profits. 25

Hence, racial anti-Semitism figured heavily in how people perceived modernist culture in

the Third Reich, and hence Jewish artists, art critics, as well as non-Jewish modernists

had to flee Germany.

Those who fled did not of course all go to the same place; moreover, many

émigrés returned to their native Germany after the war. While the United States received

the largest number of exiles, over one hundred countries worldwide served as

23 Heilbut, “Intellectuals’ Migration: The Émigré’s Conquest of American Academia,” 24. 24 Alan E. Steinweis, “Hans Hinkel and German Jewry, 1933-1941,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 38(1993): 212 in Friedlander, 3. 25 Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: The University of North CarolinaPress, 1996), 54.


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destinations for those escaping Nazism. 26 These destinations were as diverse as Kenya,

South Africa, China, and Turkey. 27 Among these countries, America received an

exceptionally talented group: the influx of scientists, artists, filmmakers, writers,

historians, and poets driven into exile by Hitler changed the tone of American culture.

But at the same time it has captured the lion’s share of historical attention, leaving other

exiles from Nazi Germany obscured in their shadow. 28 Yet much can be learned by

looking at the history of [Jewish] German exiles who went elsewhere.

Turkey was an important destination of exile for those escaping Nazism. It is an

important site for investigating the exilic experience because the Jewish German refugeescontributed enormously to the rebuilding of modern Turkey and because the Turkish case

enables us to understand different patterns in the global experience of exile. The Turkish

Republic took in about a thousand refugees from Nazi persecution during the 1930s,

26 The extent of this migration across the world was documented by the Jewish Museum of Berlin. See theexhibition catalogue Home and Exile: Jewish Emigration from Germany Since 1933 (Berlin: JudischerVerlag, 2006).27 Various scholars have chosen this ubiquitous subject for research in recent years. See, for example, LottaStone, “Seeking Asylum: German Jewish Refugees in South Africa, 1933-1948” (PhD diss., ClarkUniversity, 2010), abstract in Proquest Dissertations and Theses Online .http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/pqdweb?index=1&did=2053141071&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1292877391&clientId=13392(accessed October 20, 2010). See also Bei Gao, “China, Japan and the Flight of European Jewish Refugeesto Shanghai, 1938 – 1945” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2007), abstract in Proquest Dissertations andTheses Online .http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/pqdweb?index=6&did=1404341211&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1292881805&clientId=13392(accessed November 12, 2010).28 Heilbut described the enormous impact of these refugees on American intellectual life and scholarship in

Exiled in Paradise- German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present

(1984). Also see, Ehrhard Bahr in Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and theCrisis of Modernism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007). Bahr presents acomprehensive of the German exile community in Los Angeles of the thirties, forties, and fifties as a group,and view their lives and activities from an American point of view. Taking its cue from Adorno andHorkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment Bahr analyses the cultural production and network ofimportant writers, film-makers, musicians through the lens of modernism in his unique work on the studyof exiles from Nazism. Particularly in arts the well-documented exhibition catalog edited by StephanieBarron and Sabine Eckmann, Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (New York:Harry Ann Abrams, 1997) covers the careers, lives, and works of German and Austrian artists, architects,and photographers who immigrated to the United States and lived in exile between 1933 and 1945.

http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/pqdweb?index=1&did=2053141071&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1292877391&clientId=13392http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/pqdweb?index=1&did=2053141071&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1292877391&clientId=13392http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/pqdweb?index=6&did=1404341211&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1292881805&clientId=13392http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/pqdweb?index=6&did=1404341211&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1292881805&clientId=13392http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/pqdweb?index=6&did=1404341211&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1292881805&clientId=13392http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/pqdweb?index=6&did=1404341211&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1292881805&clientId=13392http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/pqdweb?index=1&did=2053141071&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1292877391&clientId=13392http://proquest.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/pqdweb?index=1&did=2053141071&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1292877391&clientId=13392


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including professors, teachers, artists, architects, physicians, attorneys, librarians, and

laboratory workers, as well as thousands more obscure persons. 29 Arrangements to invite

Jewish and other professors to Turkey were carried out by a Hungarian Jew, Dr. Philipp

Schwartz, a professor of pathology from Frankfurt-am-Main. Ousted by the racial laws in

1933, Schwartz fled to Switzerland and established the Notgemeinschaft Deutscher

Wissenschaftler (Emergency Assistance Association for German Scientists) in Zürich in

March 1933 to assist others driven out of Germany like himself following the Nazi rise to

power. 30 He first visited Turkey in July 1933 and convinced Istanbul Mathematics

Professor Kerim Erim and Education Minister Resit Galip that the refugee Jewish professors could help the reforms then being introduced at Istanbul University. Along

with Professor Rudolf Nissen and Albert Malche, of the University of Geneva, he left a

list of refugee professors and later convinced Kemal Atatürk to give the project his

personal support. 31

Understandably the early years that émigrés spent in Turkey proved to be very

difficult, especially since they did not speak Turkish. All contracts with professors

included a stipulation that a German professor should be able to communicate in Turkish

within at most three years. Most of the émigré families lived in Bebek, a wooded suburb

of Istanbul, whose cool summer breezes had once attracted sultans and their harems and

now appealed to Turkish officials and foreign diplomats. In the 1930s and 40s, both

Ankara and Istanbul contained a cosmopolitan culture to which the émigrés now

29 Horst Widmann, Exile und Bildunghilfe: Die Deutschsprachige akademische Emigration in die Türkeinach 1933 (Bern/Frankfurt, 1973), translated into Turkish as Atatürk Universite Reformu (Istanbul, 1981);Fritz Neumark, Zuflucht am Bosporus: Deutsche Gelehrte, Politiker und Künstler in der Emigration(Frankfurt: Knecht, 1980) in Stanford J. Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey’s Role in RescuingTurkish and European Jewry From Nazi Persecution, 1933-1945 (Palgrave - MacMillan, 1993), 4.30 Jean Medawar and David Pyke, Hitler’s Gift: The True Story of the Scientists Expelled by t he Nazi

Regime (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001), 66.31 Shaw, 5.


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contributed, finding its atmosphere quite appealing. 32 Erich Auerbach, for example, found

peace and envisioned his masterwork, Mimesis , in Istanbul. The intellectual émigrés

mingled with anti-Nazis from different nationalities in Turkey as well as with Turks.

However, the small literature on the life and history of the German exiles in Turkey, with

the exception of Kader Konuk’s East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (2010), fails to

take into account and/or does not highlight the adversities of living in Turkey: Jews,

radicals, or modernists were not, to borrow the title of a book on exiles in the Unites

States, exiled in paradise. 33

First, the German community in Istanbul was split since the diplomats and manyold residents sided with Hitler, whereas the émigré community was of course

passionately anti-Nazi. Obviously, the political and social aura of the era influenced what

the émigrés experienced in their new home. There was constant pressure on the Turkish

government itself both from the Nazis, who at times demanded that Turkey return

refugees to them, and from the British, who wanted Turkey to stop admitting refugees

and in any case not to allow them to continue to Palestine. 34

The critical geopolitical position of Turkey during World War II made the exilic

experience in Turkey different from other destinations such as Brazil, Shangai, or the US.

Close to the battlefield when compared to other destinations, Istanbul and Ankara stood

at the center of espionage and war diplomacy; and however small, a chance that Turkey

could enter the war on the side of the Axis always existed. Obviously that was an

32 See Barry Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues: Espionage, Sabotage, and Diplomatic Treachery in the Spy Capitalof World War II (New York: Pharos Book, 1992).33 For the historiography on the German émigrés who escaped to Turkey in the 1930s, see the discussion

between pages 32 and 34.34 Shaw, “Roads East: Turkey and the Jews of Europe during World War II,” in Avigdor Levy ed., Jews,Turks, Ottomans (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 258.


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imminent danger for the refugees who resided in Turkey. In April 1939, Hitler appointed

Franz von Papen as an ambassador to Turkey in the hope of dragging Turkey into war

against the Allies or at least to ensuring Turkey’s neutrality. Tirelessly and skillfully, von

Papen exploited Germany’s increased power; by the summer of 1940, he became the

most popular diplomat in Turkey. 35 The Nazis ruthlessly pursued propaganda activities in

Istanbul and Ankara. In Istanbul, for example, the German Consulate provided modern

warfare documentaries to the Turkish army for “educative purposes,” which portrayed

Poland’s or France’s fate as a foretaste of what might happen to Turkey if it entered the

war on the Allied side. These slickly produced films of German victories had a great psychological impact on audiences unaccustomed to media manipulation. Pro-Nazis also

controlled the German school in Istanbul and the Teutonia and journalists’ clubs.36 The

anti- Nazis and Jewish émigrés would obviously not hang out with other Germans unless

they were spying on each other.

A report written by Herbert Scurla, a senior civil servant of the Third Reich

dispatched by the German Ministry of Science and Education with the purpose of

strengthenin g Germany’s foothold abroad, reveals that the Third Reich had eyes and ears

on these émigrés throughout the war in Turkey. Scurla made a fact-finding trip to Turkey

in 1939 and compiled his observations in Turkey in a report he wrote to the ministry

titled “The Activities of German Academics at Turkish Research Institutions.”37 This

important document reflects the Nazi mindset and agenda in a country on the edge of the

Third Reich. In it, Scurla told the Nazi officials back in Germany that “the position of the

35 Rubin, 44.36 Ibid. 43.37 Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2010), 120.


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emigrants at the university” should be weakened since they exerted an “extraordinary

influence” on Turkish academic life; the university as a whole had been “Judaized.”38

On the one hand, having to live side by side with these pro-Nazis under these

conditions made life very difficult for the anti-Nazi and Jewish German communities.

Istanbul University’s Faculty of Western Languages and Literatures, chaired by the

Jewish-German Auerbach, for example, became a site of cultural and political collision

betwe en the Nazis and émigrés scholars. The Nazis fought hard and in 1943 succeeded in

appointing the Nazi medievalist Hennig Brinkmann as the head of the German Language

and Literature Department at Istanbul University.39

On the other hand, the critical stance of Turkey during the war led these refugees

pursue their anti-Nazi struggle more effectively. While continuing their academic

pursuits in Istanbul and Ankara, some refugees also continued their anti-Nazi struggle by

acting as a bridge between Allied intelligence and the German resistance. 40 The historian

Alexander Rüstow, for example, acted as one of those émigrés whose swords crossed

with von Papen in Istanbul. Rüstow had already been high on the Nazis’ list of intended

victims because of his ideology and because he had tried to assemble a coalition

government to keep Hitler out of power in Germany. 41

While we can understand the exilic experience by analyzing it within the political

and cultural context of the era, that experience can, in turn, shed light on the cultural

history of the era. As Hannah Arendt, who escaped from Germany to New York in 1941

38 For the Scurla Report, see Faruk Sen, Ayyildiz Altinda Sürgün- Herbert Scurla’nin Nasyonel Sosyalizm Döneminde Türkiye’de calisan Almanbilim adamlari hakkinda Yazdigi Rapor (Istanbul” GüniziYayincilik, 2008), translated from German into Turkish by Fatma Artunkal, 43-56. Also see Konuk, 120.39 Konuk, 124.40 Rubin, 43.41 Ibid. 42.


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wrote, “refugees are the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics.” Due to the

new political situation, she argued, “we became aware of the existence of a right to have

rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and

opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when

millions of people emerged who lost and co uld not regain these rights.”42

Comparison between Two Exilic Experiences: US and Turkey

Comparing the American experience of refugees with the Turkish experience

gives us insights into the similarities and differences of exile experience. The infuence ofGerman émigrés on American academia and intellectual life has also been profound, as it

was in the Turkish case. In both cases, moreover, the distinction between academic and

non-academic writers and intellectuals is very difficult to sustain. No matter where they

immigrated, the most profound difficulty for these exiles was the language barrier. For

any artist or intellectual, the loss of his/her native tongue could be disastrous. Most

academic professionals, in both American and Turkish institutions, felt inhibited about

mastering a new language in exile. Even the most fluent made blunders. Some German

émigrés in America even called their exilic experience the “exile from our native

tongue.”43 German émigrés to Turkey agreed with this phrase. Hirsch, for instance, wrote

about the difficulties of communicating in Turkish, especially in the beginning, since

Turkish belonged to a different family of languages than his native tongue.

Undoubtedly, émigrés were more familiar with English thanTurkish. Indeed, as

Heilbut argues, their English was “at times too good, too literary, too British for

42 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1976), 294.43 Helibut, Exiled in Paradise- German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the

Present , 61.


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Ameri ca.”44 The émigrés could better adapt to the new destination once they spoke the

language. Yet, language, although an important part of the émigrés’ cultural identity,

constituted only one aspect of their adaptation to new cultural and professional situations

in the new destination. So as not to be lost completely, émigré academics and artists

sought to balance preservation of their European identity and necessary adaptation to

their new home, including communicating with the natives of their new destination. 45

If not speaking their native language was difficult for émigré academics and

intellectuals; leaving their relatives and friends in mortal danger back in Europe was

profoundly demoralizing. Living as the unwanted in Hitler’s Germany was traumatic andthe émigrés carried their emotions with them in their suitcases wherever they went. Anti-

Semitism and xenophobia constituted major concerns for the émigrés in their new places.

Frances G üterbock, the wife of pioneering émigré Hittitologist Hans Güterbock, for

instance, was so traumatized by anti-Semitism in Germany that she brought that trauma

with her first to Turkey then to the US. 46 Although she moved to a new place, her

experiences back in Germany, especially those related to anti-Semitism stayed with her

throughout her life. She also lost her trust in people and argued that she neither belonged

to Turkey nor the US. 47

In America, “genteel anti- Semitism” was ubiquitous in institutions of higher

education, mostly staffed by old-stock Protestants. In the 1920s, Ivy League schools

adopted quotas for the admission of Jewish students. The number of Jews on the faculties

44 Ibid.45 See Bahr, 58 and Dorothy Lamb Crawford, “Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles,”The Musical Quarterly86 (Spring 2002): 22-26.46 For more on women refugees from the Third Reich, see Sybille Quack ed., Between Sorrow andStrength: Women Refugees of the Nazi Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 47 Frances Güterbock, interview by author, Chicago, May 6, 2008.


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their publications. 54 However, Islamic literature and press were not homogeneous in their

depiction of Jews, and therefore further research is required to support or defy Landau’s

argument.

In addition to the trauma it created, anti-Semitism also shaped the relations of

émigrés with Jewish communities in their new destinations. In Britain and the US,

government officials warned Jews that prolonging the war to rescue their people would

provoke the growth of virulent anti-Semitism, and many Jews believed them. As a result,

American Jews did not always demonstrate cordiality in welcoming émigrés.55 One

refugee remarked, “The plain fact is that since nobody knew what to do with us, we wereexpendable.”56 Turkish Jews also did not warmly welcome German Jews. 57 This distance

between the two Jewish communities in Turkey might have stemmed from the Ashkenazi

Sephardi distinction or difference in social class.

Xenophobia was another experience the émigrés endured, including non-Jewish

ones. The colleagues of Rudolf Belling, a non- Jewish émigré academic and sculptor, at

the School of Fine Arts in Istanbul, for instance, perceived him as a “foreigner.” It is also

important to note that his Turkish students thought that he was of Jewish descent. His

Germanness or Jewishness, for that reason, acted as a barrier to continuing his position in

the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul in the early 1950s.

In addition to anti- Semitism, xenophobia and language barriers, the émigrés

suffered economic hardships in the new destinations. All had to leave their belongings in

54 Landau, 294.55 Helibut, Exiled in Paradise- German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the

Present , 45.56 Ibid. 115.57 Frances Güterbock, interview by author, May 6, 2008 and Yasar Karayalcin, interview by author, April10, 2008.


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Germany, especially after 1939, but beyond that common denomination, the economic

security of the émigrés in Turkey and America differed. Once they arrived at their new

destinations, not all émigrés could secure jobs. Due to the Turkish elites’ wish to fill

academic vacancies with Western educated professors and professionals, German

émigrés had no difficulty finding jobs in Turkish universities or state institutions. The

Turkish state extended invitations to almost all professors and artists to become public

servants, since following the 1924 Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu (The Act of Unification) all

higher education institutions became public schools. The Turkish government

compensated the Germans much better than Turkish faculty, who resented the salarygap. 58

In America, on the other hand, the majority of émigré academics could not find

institutional employment. There was no state protection for academics, since the entrance

of German academics into the US was a matter of luck, not principle. For émigrés

fortunate enough to get an academic offer, salaries were low. Some émigrés had to teach

long hours to support themselves in their new lives. 59 Without institutional protection,

many intellectuals in the US supported themselves, at least, initially, by working at

menial jobs, e.g. gardeners and dishwashers, or, if strong enough, as stewards and

mechanics. Émigrés who formerly held important positions in German academia worked

in chicken farms, as warehouse foremen, or, if lucky enough, as film directors. 60

58 See Mete Tunçay and Haldun Ozmen, “Tasfiyenin Evveliyatin,”Tarih ve Toplum , no.10 (1984): 222-36.59 Émigré academics were not always content, since they did not have adequate time for research inAmerica. Hilda Geiringer von Mises, for example, complained she had no time for her research at WheatonCollege due to her extensive teaching and administrative responsibilities as a professor and Chair of theMathematics Department. See “Works about Gilda Geiringer,” inWomen of Mathematics , eds. L.S.Grinstein and P.J. Campbell (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987), 44.60 Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise- German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the

Present , 69.


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The negative side of this experience – the process of immigration, having to deal

with the bureaucracy, combined with everyday anti-Semitism and xenophobia- could lead

to depression and/or self-isolation in the new destination. 61 The feeling of “somehow I

don’t fit” was prevalent in the perceptions of the exilic community in both the U.S. and

Turkey. For instance, Hannah Arendt, asked to locate herself on the political spectrum,

replied, “So you ask me where I am. I am nowhere. I am really not in the mainstream of

the present or any other political thought. But not because I want to be so original – it so

happens that I don’t fit.62 These words spoke for a generation of émigrés who found

themselves, like Arendt, no longer belonging to any academic discipline or nationalculture. 63

Yet, in America, the émigrés had a goodly number of institutional alternatives in

places such as the Institute for Social Research and the New School for Social Research.

The Institute of Social Research welcomed German academics who embraced Marxism

and openly distanced themselves from logical positivism. Left-wing intellectuals felt

comfortable since they had funding and could publish their journals and books in German

at the institute. In the 1940s, these institutions constituted enclaves where émigrés could

isolate themselves from pragmatist American intellectuals and maintain the institutional

identity they inherited. 64 In Turkey, on the other hand, émigré scholars organized

interdisciplinary conferences to exchange ideas and discuss their scholarly work. But to

establish an institutionalized setting required more effort in Turkey than in the US.

61 For an account of how German Jewish intellectuals, filmmakers, novelists, and musicians from the ThirdReich adapted to their new home in Los Angeles, also see Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific. 62 “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt, The Recovery of the Public World , ed. Mevlyn A. Hill (NewYork: 1979) in Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise- German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the1930s to the Present , 436.63 Ibid. 437.64 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination- History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social

Research 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), 219-230.


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Starting in the 1920s, the Turkish government centralized higher education institutes.

Every initiative, whether of the émigrés or government officials, needed the consent of

the government in Turkey. This requirement was discouraging to an émigré community,

already having difficulty dealing with the state bureaucracy.

Despite the Turkish govern ment’s centralized policies, however, the émigré

scholars enthusiastically created channels to reach other scholars and the Turkish public,

by arranging conferences and music events in Turkey. Leo Spitzer, for instance,

organized interdisciplinary conferences in Istanbul University, open to public, and

managed to attract significant number of participants and listeners from diverse backgrounds. 65 Furthermore, the trio band formed by Zuckmayer with two other German

émigré musicians attracted Turkish audiences and survived the feeble music scene in

Ankara for many years.

The émigré academics and intellectuals mingled the two different cultures in their

arts and music. Zuckmayer, for instance, integrated Turkish folk music with Western

classical music by writing Turkish lyrics for his compositions. Adaptive to the needs of

the institutions in their new home, Rudolf Belling completely deviated from his original

modernist style in the plastic arts. In the School of Fine Arts in Istanbul he emphasized

classical training, believing it essential for the fundamentals of learning the plastic arts.

He achieved great success, leaving his legacy in the curriculum of plastic arts education

to the next generation of Turkish sculptors.

Undoubtedly, the city of their destination significantly influenced the adaptation of

the émigrés to their surroundings. When the émigrés arrived in the US, especially major

65 Fritz Neumark, Zuflucht am Bosporus: Deutsche Gelehrte, Politiker und Künstler in der Emigrat ion(Frankfurt: Knecht, 1980), 64.


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urban areas like New York City or San Francisco, they found themselves in the middle of

cosmopolitan cities. In Istanbul, a small clique of refugees existed: anti-Nazi Germans

and Jews established friendships with each other. 66 The émigrés could build their

emotional networks around that circle, which proved rather effective especially during

stressful times. Although Istanbul was comparable to New York in terms of vitality in the

1930s, cultural l ife in Ankara was weak. Émigré artists and musicians created the first

classical music and arts scene Ankara ever had. But from the perspective of émigrés, all

these cities differed from Berlin or Frankfurt. During the interwar era, more than any

other European city, Berlin had provided the setting for young radicals to employ art andtechnology as complementary tools of the modernist revolution. Now, in Ankara and

Istanbul, these émigré artists and scholars servedthe Turkish Republican Revolution. 67

The Orient and America differed from Germany and the émigrés became shrewd

and practical observers of their new homes. Exile required the special alertness to culture

and politics they initially cultivated as the German humanist tradition’s last, best heirs.68

And both in Turkey and in the US, the émigrés’ enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge

and their intellectual curiosity made the transition to exile smoother and their lives better,

both morally and emotionally. 69 Their curiosity led them to explore their surroundings

and the Turkish people extensively. The more they wanted to know Turkey, the more

Turkish people they met, and consequently they became involved in Turkish culture.

Traugott Fuchs, for instance, often spent time with the Turkish people in his

66 Scurla Report in Sen, 91.67 Ibid. 20.68 Ernst Hirsch, Anilarim- Kayzer Donemi, Weimar Cumhuriyeti, AtatürkÜlkesi , rev. Turkish ed., trans.Fatma Suphi (Tubitak, 2002), 223 and Heilbut, “Intellectuals’ Migration: The Émigrés’ Conquest ofAmerican Academia,” 22. 69 See Hirsch, 300-24 and Neumark, 61, 72-83.


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sense of trust. 72 By giving unyielding support to “Atatürk’s Turkey and by working very

hard under d ifficult conditions, the émigrés contributed to the success of the young

Republic in their own fields. Although a majority of the émigrés seemed happy to

contribute to the modernization process in Atat ürk’s Turkey, the more they spent time in

Turkey, the more they became aware of the problems accompanying radical changes.

During the seminars he gave in Germany after World War II, Zuckmayer familiarized his

students with the new Turkish music and discussed the problems attendant on

westernizing it. Thus, whi le contributing to the cultural revolution, the émigrés also

gained awareness about the repercussions and consequences of these drastic changes inTurkish society.

Transnationalism and Nation-Building: German and Jewish Exile Contribution toTurkish Modernization

Transnational encounters between Europe and Ottoman Turkey started much

earlier than the German émigrés involvement in Turkish cultural life. Nevertheless, if we

were to measure the effect of transnationalism by the flow of people, ideas, and change

among interacting communities, then at no point in history did change occur as rapidly as

in Turkey during the early Republican era. While some of these émigré scholars did not

want to leave Turkey once World War II was over, others saw Turkey only as a transitory

place and either emigrated to Israel, or the US, or returned to Germany once the war was

over. All these émigrés not only contributed to the establishment of major departments at

Turkish institutions, but also established scholarly journals in their own fields, created

libraries, established research institutes, organized conferences. They also explored

Turkish culture extensively. Enthusiastically involved with their surroundings, they

72 See, for example, Hirsch’s or Neumark’s memoirs.


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traveled to remote places in Anatolia in the 1940s, a time when such travel was not

popular even among urban Turks. These refugees wanted to create a cultural synthesis

between their native Germany and Turkey through their music, painting, sculpture,

poetry, and through the humanities and humanistic education.

That said, not all Germans who resided in Turkey were interested in pursuing or

disseminating humanistic education. In the 1930s and 1940s, Istanbul and Ankara

became sites of contention between pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi Germans. The Nazis

ruthlessly pursued the dissemination of their ideology in a country on the edge of

Western Europe. Nazism, as an ideology, embraced the unity of all Germans by blood; tothe Nazi mindet, the descendants of German emigrants around the world needed to be

awakened to their racial duties in support of Hitler. In Turkey, that kind of support found

its expression in Scurla’s attempts to besmirch the German Jewish émigré scholars,

discredit their work, and keep them away from influential positions in Turkey. However,

these attempts failed because the refugee clique in Turkey was both very strong and had

strong relations with the Turkish government officials. 73 The Turkish government saw

any kind of advice from the German officials about the assignment of professors to

positions at Turkish universities as interference with its internal affairs and thus resisted

or ignored it. 74 Scurla’s report makes clear that the Turkish government and the members

of the faculty clearly preferred the émigré scholars to the pro-Nazi academics who tried

to infiltrate the Turkish education system at least until the early 1940s.

Undoubtedly, interaction between the refugees and the Turkish people was not a

one-w ay process. The German émigrés brought ideas, techniques and organizational

73 See Scurla Report in Sen, 80.74 Ibid. 91.


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experience to their new home, but were also influenced by Turkish culture, and

represented Turkish culture to Europeans. How Turkey was represented abroad,

especially in Europe, wa s very important to the Republican elite. These émigré

intellectuals and artists diligently helped the new Republic establish its cultural

infrastructure, and by doing so contributed to its modernization efforts. They also trained

a generation of artists, musicians, and teachers to function as creators and arbiters of the

new public taste in Turkey.

As cosmopolitans and agents of change, the émigrés contributed to the

modernization in Turkey more effectively than any other group. Their sense ofdisplacement as exiles made them more flexible about a new culture; they were happy to

embrace and welcome change in modern Turkey. Modernization and institutionalization

of music and arts education would not have proceeded so quickly had the Jewish,

cosmopolitan, and exile mindset not contributed to it. The confluence of the two groups

in history - modernist exiles who fled Nazi Germany and Kemalists in Turkey – led to a

drastic change in the institutions of Turkish culture. This transformation has been

contested and controversial almost from the start and increasingly so in recent decades.

But it nevertheless constitutes one of the most striking examples of the power that

transnational networks and influences have to re-shape existing social, political, and

cultural norms. Eventually, the German émigrés helped to create a hybrid new culture

that was both modern and traditional.

As Michael Geyer suggests, we can best capture the historical reality by exploring

how cross-territorial forces in the form of ideas and a real dialogue among multiple actors


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conditioned the nation-building processes as a dynamic space of decision-making. 75 This

dissertation, therefore, shows how the extraordinary influence of these transnational

forces in the form of these German émigré scholars; their ideas, art forms, and

educational policies, conditioned the nation-building processes for the unique Turkish

case. The dissertation explores the encounters of the émigrés in two interrelated contexts:

first, westernization and modernization processes; and second, nation-building processes

and transnational encounters.

Historiography on Exile from Nazism to Turkey

Despite a prodigious number of publications about Turkish immigrants in

Germany in the second half of the twentieth century, very little English work is available

on the refugees from Hitler’s Germany who immigrated to Turkey during the Second

World War years, and nothing focuses on artists and musicians. The first and most

comprehensive account of German immigrants in Turkey was published in German by

Horst Widmann (1973): Exile und Bildungshilfe: Die Deutschsprachige akademische

Emigration in die Türkei nach 1933(Exile and the Remedy in Education: The

Immigration of German Speaking Academics to Turkey after 1933), translated into

Turkish in 1981 as Atatürk Üniversite Reformu(Ata türk’s University Reform). This

important work has not been translated into English. Some refugees’ memoirs were

published in the 1970s and 1980s, but those, too, have not appeared in English.

The first published work in English in this field was Stanley Shaw’sTurkey and

the Holocaust (1993). Shaw argued that Turkey, as a neutral country, played a significant

role during World War II, saving thousands of Jewish lives in France, by providing them

75 Michael Geyer, “Where Germans Dwell: Transnationalism in Theory and Practice,”GSA LuncheonAddress, Newsletter of the German Studies Association (30 September 2006): 29-37.


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paperwork through the Turkish Consulate Generals in Paris and Marseilles to prove that

they were Turkish citizens. He was also the first scholar to discuss Turkey’s admission of

hundreds of German refugee scholars, artists and scientists, many of them Jews, who had

fled Nazi Germany and Austria. Shaw gave a brief account of the lives of some

prominent refugees and touched upon Turkish public opinion concerning those scholars,

but did not write the stories of individuals in any detail. His focus was mainly on

Turkey’s role in the transfer of mostly illegal Jewish immigr ants to Palestine and in the

protection and rescue of Jews, mostly Turkish citizens, from Nazi occupied France.

In Jews, Turks, Ottomans- A Shared History (2002), Frank Tachau writes aboutGerman Jewish academics who escaped from the Nazis to Turkey. In ‘German Jewish

Emigrés in Turkey’, Tachau argues that the reform of higher education in Turkey was a

product of Kemal Ata türk’s nationalist program. Referring to Widmann for quantitative

information, such as the number of German émigré scholars indifferent academic fields

in Turkey, Tachau highlights the ambiguous position of the refugees regarding their

German passports and their relations with the pro-Nazi German community in Turkey.

But, using secondary sources, Tachau does not substantiate his argument with new

research.

In Turkey’s Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Atatürk’s Vision (2006)

Arnold Reisman sheds light on the contributions of German refugees to the

modernization of Turkey. But probably because of the large number of individuals he

writes about, Reisman cannot analyze the life story of each individual in a detailed way.

His account reads like an elaborated version of Who’s Who, although invaluable because

of his contribution to this under-researched component of Turkish history.


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Kader Konuk’s East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (2010) is particularly

important in the literature of German exile experience because she sheds light on issues

that have not been highlighted before: Anti-Semitism in Turkish institutions, the

repercussions of the Scurla Report, Auerbach’s role in the dissemination of humanistic

education in Turkey.

This dissertation builds upon their work and enhances it further by trying to

highlight the European influence on Turkish institutions and culture after the fall of

Ottoman Empire. Anti-Semitism in Turkish society existed, and Jewish as well as anti-

Nazi Germans may have been discouraged by the existence of the Nazis in Istanbul andAnkara to a certain extent. 76 But despite the Nazi effort to spread anti-Semitism in

Turkey and suppress the Jewish influence in Turkish institutions, the modernist, Jewish,

and non-Nazi Germans profoundly impacted the building of modern Turkish national

identity.

The Structure of the Dissertation

In the 1920s and 1930s, literature, music, and art served as the most important

media through which Turkish artists articulated their views on national identity.

Undoubtedly, the Republican project encouraged artists to work towards the Kemalist

project of creating the modern Turk. Underscoring the confluence of two histories, that of

post-Ottoman Turkey and post-World War I/ Versailles Germany, this dissertation tells

the stories of the most under-researched refugee groups: artists, musicians, and cultural

76 Nadir Nadi, for example, was the founder of a very influential newspaper Cumhuriyet in Turkey. In the1930s the paper had reputation for being pro-Nazi, pro-war, and anti-Semitic. Nadi, himself, was known tomake his wealth by doing business with the Nazis. So it would be wrong to say anti-Semitism did not existin Turkey in the 1930s.


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reformers. In particular, it focuses on the humanities scholars Traugott Fuchs, Eduard

Zuckmayer (1890-1972), Rudolf Belling (1886-1972), each of whom played significant

roles in the establishment of humanities, music and arts education, and the building of

modern Turkish national identity.

The first chapter discusses the nationalistic currents during the late Ottoman

period, focusing on their elitist motivations. The chapter provides important background

to the study of the 1930s by considering the motivations and policies of the newly

founded Turkish Republic concerning the creation of a Turkish nation and nationhood. It

also analyzes the role of transnational elements in the construction of the modern“Western” Turk, a theme absent from the scholarly literature.

Highlighting reforms in language, foreign language teaching, and humanistic

education, the second chapter analyzes the westernization efforts of Turkish state elites.

Expert advice from European and American scholars had a significant effect on

educational reforms during the early Republican era. G ökalp’s understanding of Western

superiority, indeed, found expression in the education reforms carried out by the

Republican cadre, with expert advice from European and American pedagogues. 77 Their

advice had a significant role in inviting approximately three hundred German émigré

scholars to Turkey. This chapter demonstrates the active involvement of émigré

humanities professors with the Kemalist revolution, stressing their contributions to both

Turkish higher education and the cosmopolitan culture of Turkey. These scholars had a

profound impact on the spread of the European humanistic culture and European

77 Ziya Gökalp was considered the intellectual father of the modern Turkish nation. He influenced KemalAtatürk and many state elites during the late Ottoman era. For an excellent work on Ziya Gökalp’sinfluen ce on modern Turkish nationalism, see Uriel Heyd’s Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Lifeand Teachings of Ziya Gökalp (London: Luzac and Harvill Press: 1950).


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languages to the general Turkish population and on the reconstruction of humanities and

Turkish Studies departments in higher education institutes in Turkey. A German émigré

writer, artist, and teacher of German language and literature, Fuchs participated widely in

this process. In 1934, he followed his mentor, Leo Spitzer, who had been dismissed from

Heidelberg University because of his Jewish descent, to Istanbul. Fuchs worked at the

Bo ğ aziçi (Bosphorus) University for over forty years and founded the German Language

and Literature Program at Bo ğ aziçi in the 1940s.

The third chapter focuses on the role of music and Eduard Zuckmayer’s efforts in

the construction of modern Turkish national identity. Half Jewish through his mother anda musician and piano teacher, Zuckmayer (1890-1972) founded the Gazi School of

Education, Music Teachers Training Institute and co-founded the Ankara Devlet

Konservatuari (Ankara State Conservatory). 78 Zuckmayer had been a student of Paul

Hindemith (1895 – 1963), whom Kemal Atat ürk had invited as an advisor in reorganizing

Turkish music educati on a few years before Zuckmayer’s arrival in Turkey.In 1936,

Zuckmayer accepted Hindemith’sinvitation to teach at the conservatory and the state

music school in Ankara. Once in Turkey, Zuckmayer diligently followed Hindemith’s

advice in transforming the system of music education in Turkey. And from the time he

accepted his post, until his death in 1972, he devoted his life to his students and the Gazi

Institute he founded and managed for thirty-six years in Ankara. As a transnational

figure, Zuckmayer’s contribution had no equal in Turkish history. Zuckmayer transferred

his administrative, teaching, and music skills from Germany, establishing and directing

78 Karl Ebert (1887 – 1980) was another Jewish German whom Kemal Atat ürk invited to Ankara in the1935-36 academic year. He was instrumental in the foundation of Turkish State Opera and Ballet.


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the institute in Ankara, and thus helped a generation of musicians acquire a high level of

western music skills. He also contributed to the creation of a new public taste in music.

The fourth chapter examines the continuities and ruptures in the arts from the late

Ottoman to early Republican era, and highlights the profound change in visual arts after

the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Focusing on the world-renowned sculptor Rudolf

Belling, this chapter demonstrates his extensive contributions to education in the modern

fine arts through his teaching, style of management, his curricular reform, and artistic

philosophy. Belling, a founder of the radical modernist Novembergruppe in Berlin, fled

Germany in 1935 because his sculpture had been a particular target of the Nazi attack onthe so-called degenerate art. He preferred Turkey to the US, since he wanted to be close

to his son, who was Jewish through his mother. Belling established the sculpture program

at the Mimar Sinan University, Department of Fine Arts in Istanbul in 1937, and lived in

Turkey until 1966. His work in Turkey marked a watershed in the history of modern

Turkish visual arts. He reconstructed the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine

Arts, the major school for artists and fine arts teachers from the nineteenth century to the

present. Sadly, Belling’s experiences in Turkey differed from those of many others, since

the administration at the School of Fine Arts showed enmity towards him and eventually

forced him to resign from his post. Not every émigré experience reflects a positive

encounter of Turkish soc iety with the émigrés.

The conclusion will move us forward chronologically and analyze the influence

of the émigrés on Turkey in the years that followed. The main discussion will focus on

the importance of transnational networks on the building of national identity in Turkey.


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territory, instead of religion. However, Ottomanism lacked the emotional and cultural

attachments embodied in European concepts of nation and nationality. 1 As the series of

secessions from the Empire during the 19 th century made clear, a vague and unfounded

ideology such as Ottomanism could not compete with nationalist enthusiasms. 2

The failure of Ottomanism led to the rise of Turkism, combining a territorial basis

with ethnic “Turkish irredentism”. Turkism, an alien concept for the multiethnic

Ottomans, was largely ignored in the late nineteenth century. Turkism called for the

political union of all Turkish-speaking peoples in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, China,

Documents

German Refugees in Turkey