German Academic Exiles in Istanbul: Translation as the Bildung of the Other

AZADE SEYHAN

Alexander Rüstow, a classicist by training and a Socialist by calling who was the administrative director of the German Machine Manufacturing Association (Verein deutscher Maschinenbauanstalten) and Dozent at the Berlin Trade Institute (Berliner Handelshochschule) made a narrow escape to Istanbul, when his efforts to form a coalition government to keep Hitler out of power failed. Political activist, cultural sociologist, economist, and philosopher, Rüstow taught economics, economic geography, and philosophy at the University of Istanbul between 1933 and 1949. He was also active in the anti-Nazi movement of the German refugees in Istanbul and acted as liaison between the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, a U.S. wartime intelligence agency) and the German resistance. Rüstow’s many areas of scholarly expertise constituted a prototype of the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. However, his unwavering commitment to political action and the contiguity of his theory with practice make Raymond Williams’s version of cultural studies look like ivory tower scholarship. Rüstow’s doctoral dissertation, entitled, Der Lügner: Theorie, Geschichte, und Auflösung (The Liar: Theory, History, and Solution), was an analysis of the classical Greek paradox of the liar: “Epimedines the Cretan says, All Cretans always lie: True of False” (Dankwart A. Rustow xiv). The Nazi reign of terror that sent Rüstow into a long-term exile forced German culture to experience its most fateful paradoxes. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Rüstow’s fellow exiles during Hitler’s reign, made the radical observation that the paradox of the Enlightenment led to the demise of its own humanistic ideals and resulted in the darkness of an age arguably unparalleled in its barbarism.

The premise of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) is that the Enlightenment, which was initially a critique of the mythical world, became in time fossilized, resistant to self-questioning, and ultimately resembled that which it sought to replace—the ancient myth. Adorno and Horkheimer see this transformation as the inevitability of a dialectic turn where instrumental reason, a pillar of enlightenment view, valorized method over experience, so that experience that did not coincide with method was deemed irrational. Dialectical thought functions as criticism and resists affirmations that falsify the present and gloss over injustices of history. Understanding this dialectic would lead to a correction of the authoritarian nature of Enlightenment rationality. But the inability to recognize the unfolding contradiction of the Enlightenment program has pushed the modern age into a dangerous state of blindness. The gloomy tenor of this analysis needs to be seen in the context of a time when a generation was handcuffed to a raging fascism in Europe, on the one hand, and to a growing consumerism in America, on the other. The fractured myths of the Enlightenment—liberal humanism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism—emerged in grotesque reconfigurations of persecution, racism, and ultranationalism. The philosophical optimism characteristic of the nation-state shattered into p/articles of disbelief, when the first half of the twentieth century began witnessing the victimization and deportation of millions of citizens by their own governments. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, modernity transmogrified the ideals of the Enlightenment into a massive betrayal of the masses (Horkheimer 41).

I would like to thank Professor Jeffrey Peck, Director of the Canadian Center for German and European Studies for inviting me to Toronto to present an earlier version of this essay at the Special Session on German/European Cosmopolitanism at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of Teachers of German on May 27, 2002. I would also like to thank Professor Karin Bauer of McGill University for her comments on the essay.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the critique of the Enlightenment and its ideals of progress, freedom from authority, and normative humanism have most rigorously been exercised by thinkers, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin, whose lives and careers were compromised and interrupted by exile and extremity during the Nazi reign of terror. Their reflections on and redefinitions of modernity, morality, and agency are determined to a large extent by the specific condition of exile itself. Many other European writers and philosophers—among them Primo Levi, Albert Camus, Jorge Semprún—whose lives had been inscribed by extremities of persecution, loss, and dislocation, recast the inexpressible idiom of extreme trauma into a critical reflection on the historical and sociopolitical conditions for the production of a morally impoverished Zeitgeist. Deprived of livelihood, persecuted, and hunted, they wrote, in Emily Apter’s poignant words, “criticism as a kind of message in a bottle dispatched to former interlocutors whose whereabouts were unknown, whose lives were uncertain” (88).

Ironically, the bankruptcy of the bravest ideals of the Enlightenment was at least partially countered by the new critical coordinates and paradigms exile offered. Recalling Friedrich Nietzsche’s affirmation of homelessness, Adorno observes, “es gehört zur Moral, nicht bei sich selber zu Hause zu sein” (it is ethical for the self not to be at home) (Adorno 43). The ethos of exile expanded the concept of cosmopolitanism and sensitized it to the reality of historical, geographical, cultural, and linguistic difference. “Ethos means to locate oneself in another place,” Iain Chambers states, “[i]n the endless interplay between ethos and topos we are forced to move beyond rigid positions and locations, beyond forms of judgement dependent upon the abstract identification of values that have already been decided and legislated for in advance” (42). In a certain sense, the best intentions of the Enlightenment paradigm survived in a self-reflexive, reinterpreted, or reimagined mode in pockets and margins of exile.

Many German intellectuals and artists who fled Hitler’s Germany strove to preserve something of a moral and intellectual legacy that lay in ruins. And the countries that offered these Germans refuge strove, in the interest of a genuine understanding of cosmopolitanism, to negotiate between the conflicting demands of universal hospitality and limitations on rights of residence, another paradox of political immigration that Jacques Derrida has addressed in a speech delivered at the International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg in 1996. In a highly charged political atmosphere in the wake of mass demonstrations—condemning the violent subjugation of immigrants and undocumented aliens to the Debret laws in a country proud of its reputation as a place of refuge from persecution—Derrida takes up the question of “Cities of Refuge,” where exiles and migrants can find sanctuary. He reiterates the need previously expressed by the international parliament of writers to institute autonomous “free cities,” independent, as much as possible, from the state and from one another yet forming an alliance “according to laws of solidarity yet to be invented.” The task of the writers would be the invention of these laws whereby free cities would “reorient the politics of the state” and “transform the modalities of membership” that join a sovereign city as sanctuary to the state (Derrida, 2001 4). Here Derrida recalls how Hannah Arendt underlined the trauma of an unprecedented number of refugees between the two wars who, without recourse to repatriation and naturalization, could not be granted any status recognized by international state laws, not even that of “stateless people” (9). The task at hand, then, is to reclaim a new meaning and identity as a sovereign entity for the “city” that would free it from the authority of nation-states in matters of hospitality and refuge. The idea of such a city, however, cannot be disassociated from its political implementation. It is in the latter that the contradictory logic of cosmopolitanism resides. On the one hand, the rule of unconditional hospitality inherent in cosmopolitanism aspires to welcome all refugees; on the other hand, certain limitations have to be imposed on rights of residence that Derrida, citing Kant’s formulation of cosmopolitanism, sees as dependent on treaties between nations (20–23).

A historically noteworthy, albeit incomplete, implementation of the idea of cities of refuge was realized between the two wars in the two major cities, Istanbul, the old capital, and Ankara, the new capital of a fledgling new nation, the Republic of Turkey. Of course, these cities were not independent of the nation-state; nevertheless, the state itself managed to circumvent the letter of the international law in order to grant refuge and work to many German and Austrian academics and artists who had to flee the Third Reich (it must, of course, also be noted that the city doors were not open to all refugees from Germany but mostly to those who came with intellectual capital). The hospitality extended to the German refugees was perhaps less an expression of a cosmopolitan consciousness than a response to the demands of the cultural politics of the nation. The formative years of the Turkish Republic, which was established in 1923 after the fall of the Ottoman dynasty in the First World War, coincided with the cataclysmic events of German history commencing with Hitler’s rapid rise to political power in 1933. Many German and a few Austrian academics as well as some non-academics who, either because of their political inclinations or faith or both, or marriage to a non-Aryan spouse, could hope neither to make a living nor live in Germany, accepted the invitation to teach at the universities of Istanbul and Ankara.

Many critics and historians have underlined the irreparable blow dealt to Germany’s intellectual legacy as a result of the massive migration of its scientists, politicians, thinkers, writers, and artists between the years 1933 and 1945. Even though several exiles returned to their homeland after the war and some were reinstated in their former positions, many branches of knowledge and disciplines lagged behind or were altogether cut off from new advances, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives with regard to their respective fields of inquiry. In Exodus der Kultur, a critical historical account of the emigration of German scholars, writers, and artists, Horst Möller notes that both the German intellectuals in exile and the culture they left behind endured multiple losses. Many major thinkers and writers, such as Stefan Zweig, Walter Benjamin, and Kurt Tucholsky took their own lives in exile; others could not establish themselves in a foreign culture nor continue with their scholarly or artistic work. The best products of the Weimar culture were lost or went to waste during the transport. And perhaps most deplorably, “Ein Ende fand die zu kulturellen Leistungen von Rang führende deutsch-jüdische Symbiose, die in ihrer Größe und Eigenart unwiderbringlich ist” [the German-Jewish symbiosis characterized by cultural achievements of a high caliber and irrevocable in terms of its greatness and singularity came to an end] (Möller 118). What survived of German intellectual culture during the fateful years between 1933 and 1945 was preserved and reproduced at various sites of exile and in the invisible spaces of inner emigration.

Although the emigration of German scholars and writers to other European countries and particularly to the United States has been studied fairly extensively, the long-term sojourn of many noted academics, artists, and politicians in Turkey has received scant critical attention. Among the roughly 130 German refugees and exiles in Turkey during the twelve years of what was supposed to be a Thousand Year Reich were Rüstow, Ernst Reuter (an urban planner who before his exile was the Socialist mayor of Magdeburg and after his return to Germany the mayor of Berlin), Fritz Neumark (a prominent economist who taught at the University of Istanbul and served twice as the Rektor of the University of Frankfurt upon his return to Germany), Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach (philologists and literary critics), Georg Rohde (a classical philologist and the architect, along with the Turkish Minister of Education Hasan Ali Yücel, of a major project of translation of world classics into Turkish), Rudolf Nissen (a professor of surgery at the University of Berlin who headed the surgery department of the Medical School of the University of Istanbul between 1933 and 1939, and trained numerous Turkish professors and physicians), Rudolf Belling (a sculptor fired from his position at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts as one of the representatives of “entartete Kunst” [degenerate art] who then was appointed by Atatürk himself as chair of the sculpture department of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts), Paul Hindemith (a musician and composer who helped found the Ankara State Conservatory), and Carl Ebert (a theatrical producer and director who founded and directed the Ankara State Opera Company). The list of luminaries goes on. This chapter of German intellectual history and its role in instituting a prescient transcultural and translational field of knowledge still awaits critical remembrance.

In the foreword to his anecdotally rich memoir, Zuflucht am Bosporus: Deutsche Gelehrte, Politiker und Künstler in der Emigration 1933–1953 (Escape to the Bosphorus: German Scholars, Politicians, and Artists in Exile 1933–1953), Fritz Neumark observes that although in the years following 1933 the number of German-speaking refugees in other countries, especially in the United States, far exceeded those in Turkey, in no other place was the relative significance of German refugees as great as it was in Turkey, and nowhere else did their work leave as permanent an impact (Neumark 8–9). Although I have a personal connection through my parents’ lives and careers to the story of the German academic migration to Istanbul, my interest is guided more by the suggestive force of this intellectual transport, insofar as it raises questions of translation, linguistic dislocation, national culture formation and its ideological underpinnings, as well as the problematic of tending to a cultural heritage compromised by silencing and exile.

The attempted rehabilitation of a humanistic legacy shattered by the experience of Nazi persecution became, by a strange twist of history, linked to the formation of the young Turkish republic that aspired to translate what it saw as the exemplary representation of Western education into its own discourse of nation. Multiple modalities of translation underwrote the Republic’s cultural reform movement. Arguably, the first and most significant translation project was the alphabet reform, known as harf devrimi (letter reform) that was engineered by a commission of linguists, presided over by Atatürk himself, that painstakingly transliterated the Arabic script of Ottoman Turkish into a slightly modified Roman alphabet. The result was a very phonetic alphabet that radically raised the rate of literacy. Along with this form of translation was the attempt to translate Ottoman Turkish, a hybrid language of the court mostly composed of Arabic and Persian words and constructions, into an “essential” or “real” Turkish by replacing the former with existing Turkish words or neologisms derived from extant stems. Both these projects were later criticized for their supposed hidden agenda of creating a cultural discontinuity whereby the post-reform generations could not read or understand most of what was written as late as in the early 1920s.

The third modality of translation was to go into effect as a result of the crossed historical destinies of the mass exodus from Nazi Germany and the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe on the one hand, and the growing pains of a new nation in Asia Minor, on the other. The necessity to capitalize on the body of knowledge at their disposal led the Turkish university administrators and academics to improvise protocols of translation and writing that effectively aided a cross-fertilization of linguistic and intellectual heritages. These innovative conventions of translation were implicated in the resituation of a Western intellectual legacy in a radically different cultural geography. And finally, a fourth blueprint of translation in the most literal sense was drafted by Hasan Ali Yücel, the Turkish Minister of Education (1938–1946), himself a prolific and multilingual comparatist critic and translator. With the help of Georg Rohde, Yücel implemented a large-scale project of the translation into modern Turkish of a record number of Western and Eastern classics.1 I shall discuss shortly the interlinked destinies of these translational moments with their larger conceptual and sociocultural contexts. However, in order to understand the critical trajectory of the association between translation and the radical transformation of a national culture, a brief detour through history is necessary.

The Machtergreifung of 1933 and the subsequent dismissal of numerous Jewish professors from their posts coincided with the radical reform movements Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish republic and its first president, had undertaken in an ambitious attempt of modernization (which was typically synonymous with Westernization in many lands of the East coming into belated nationhood). In Zuflucht am Bosporus, Neumark states that the departure of German intellectuals began with the passing of the bill, “Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums” (Re-establishment of the Civil Service Law), a few weeks after the Nazi rise to power in 1933. This law led to the speedy dismissal of scores of Jewish and politically suspect professors from their positions (Neumark 13). Realizing that the worst was yet to come, many of them started looking for ways of leaving Germany. Among those fired from their jobs was a Hungarian born Frankfurt pathologist, Dr. Philipp Schwartz, who fled with his family to Switzerland. In March 1933 Schwartz established in Zürich the Notgemeinschaft Deutscher Wissenschaftler im Ausland (Emergency Assistance Organization for German Scientists) to help Jewish and other persecuted German scholars secure employment in countries prepared to receive German refugees.

Meanwhile, Atatürk and his visionary ministers were engaged in an intensive modernization of Turkish higher education. This involved the transformation of the existing scholastic-Ottoman institution of the Dar-ül Fünun (Arabic for “house of knowledge”) into the University of Istanbul fashioned after the nineteenth-century German university model. Schwartz got in touch with interested parties in Turkey and, along with Professor Rudolf Nissen and Professor Albert Malche of the University of Geneva, he visited Turkey in July 1933 and convinced the young Turkish Minister of Education Reşit Galip that the participation of distinguished refugee professors would contribute immensely to the success of the Turkish university reform. The visiting committee left a list of names with Galip who persuaded Atatürk to personally support the project. The Turkish Minister of Health Refik Saydam, another reform-minded cabinet member, was keenly interested in inviting professors of medicine to work in the university hospitals and other medical facilities. Since Germany would have been reluctant to allow a massive exodus of scholars, it was decided that the contracts would be signed in a neutral country, in this case, Switzerland. The refugee professors were given long-term (five-year renewable) contracts, salaries that were four or five times the amount paid to Turkish faculty, and travel and moving expenses. In turn, the contract stipulated that the professors learn Turkish as soon as possible and write textbooks and scholarly books in their fields of expertise.

Among the many competent faculty members of the Dar-ül Fünun there were also those who showed up at work only to collect their modest paychecks. Like all the fossilized elements at institutions, they were expected to put up a resistance to the reform project and the foreign “intruders.” In an effort to stymie any resistance, the architects of the university reform prepared a law that ordered the closure of the Dar-ül Fünun on July 31, 1933 and the establishment of the new university on August 1, 1933. Most German professors settled into a rather privileged and comfortable existence on the hills of Bebek, a fashionable suburb overlooking the strait of the Bosphorus. Several newcomers were allowed to bring along their assistants and were also assigned Turkish assistant translators. Tutors were hired for the private education of their children. Understandably, the hospitality extended to the refugees was not necessarily universal. The German professors, scientists, and doctors were resented by many Turkish academics who were either dismissed as part of the university reform or were appointed as assistants to the newcomers, when in fact they had the credentials to be appointed to the choice positions offered to the guest professors. Turkish professors of medicine as well as doctors in private practice did not want competition from world-renowned experts who were running the clinics of the University of Istanbul.

Although the German professors’ contracts stipulated that they learn Turkish in three years, most professors could not fulfill the language requirement of the contract and had to rely on translators. Their dependence on translation made them vulnerable to vocal criticism from their disgruntled colleagues. However, translation, as a means of negotiating different cultural discourses, proved to be an effective instrument of education. The translators, most of them professors and distinguished academics themselves who were trained at European universities, were able not only to transform complex ideas into an accessible idiom but also to inspire the students to learn other languages, since the translator enjoyed the powerful status of at once messenger, interpreter, and arbiter. When prominent Turkish scholar-teachers, such as Azra Erhat, Sabri Ülgener, or Mina Urgan translated, they did not just relate content; they brought into the language the richness of context and offered students linguistic and cultural resources that provided a dynamic learning setting. This mode of translation promoted a kind of social awakening and the circulation of the material value of knowledge that coincided with the vision of the education reform. In fact, the attempts of many German professors to lecture in Turkish met with the disapproval of most students, who preferred expert translation to a stutter that concealed expert knowledge. In Turkey and the Holocaust, noted historian Stanford Shaw quotes from a memorandum sent in July 1936 from the United States Embassy in Istanbul (it seems that the American officials were monitoring German activities in Turkey very closely at this time) to the State Department:

Turkish students do not generally understand German; but both those who do and those who do not often find that the subject matter of the lectures is made clearer when the professor speaks in German and has his remarks translated into Turkish by an expert interpreter than when he speaks Turkish badly. One professor has said that when he tried to speak Turkish to the students they stamped and yelled until he changed back into German. (Shaw 12)

Thus, despite the clause in their contracts, most German professors continued to lecture in German, and the lectures were translated. Since there was a shortage of competent translators of German among the faculty and the students, the professors sometimes lectured in French or English in order to make use of a larger pool of translators. In a very concrete sense, then, the Turkish higher education reform was underwritten by a massive translation project. Translation became a trope, specifically, a metaphor for higher education at the new university. Alexander Rüstow, though he never became very proficient in Turkish during his long sojourn in Turkey, inspired generations of idealistic Turkish students with his interdisciplinary imagination and method through translations of his lectures, articles, and books on economics, economic geography, sociology, and cultural history. He viewed transmission of knowledge in translation as an effective discursive practice.2 In fact, since Rüstow’s interdisciplinary critical idiom was well suited to an analytic probing of history’s crises and its disjunctive, revolutionary, and transitional moments, it resonated powerfully with his students and readers who were trying to understand and come to grips with the momentous political, social, and cultural transformations they were witness to. Through his political and intellectual engagement with the host country, Rüstow made excellent use of his exile years and wrote his painstakingly thorough, historically and critically astute three-volume magnum opus, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart (Positioning the Present), that was published shortly after the war in Switzerland. Neumark considers this book a work of “visionarär Kraft” (visionary power) and “eines der bedeutendesten Werke, die von deutschsprachigen Sozialwissenschaftlern in der Emigration geschrieben wurde” (one of the most important works written by German-speaking social scientists in exile) (76).

Several German professors, among them Fritz Arndt, Fritz Neumark, and Ernst Hirsch, became fluent in Turkish and complemented their many works in translation with those written in Turkish. In a similar vein, many Turkish professors were expected to publish their works in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals as a result of the promotion criteria established at the modernized university. What this meant was that they had to publish in European and Western professional journals, in “high status” scholarly languages, such as French, English, and German. These expectations of added fluency brought German and Turkish scholars together in the framework of translational and dialogic projects. In collaboration with their Turkish colleague/translators, many German professors wrote widely used textbooks as well as major scholarly books and, for the first time in the history of the Turkish university, founded scholarly journals. One of these, edited by Leo Spitzer, Romanoloji Semineri Dergisi (Zeitschrift des romanischen Seminars), unfortunately consisted of a single issue. Spitzer’s successor Auerbach founded the Garp Filolojileri Dergisi (Zeitschrift für europäische Philologie) in 1947 shortly before his move to the United States. He published a highly regarded textbook, Einführung in die romanische Philologie, translated by his successor Süheyla Bayrav (Roman filolojisine giriş). This book appeared in French translation in 1949 in Frankfurt and was also translated into English and published posthumously as Introduction to Romance Languages and Literature in 1961.

Istanbuler Schriften (İstanbul Yazıları), a monograph series that began publication in 1947 was instrumental in keeping both the exiles and Turkish scholars in contact with their colleagues in the West. The majority of the contributions were in German, but a few appeared in Turkish. Auerbach’s arguably most celebrated essay, “Figura” was published in his collection, Neue Dantestudien, which appeared in this series. Ernst Hirsch, the youngest scholar to be invited from abroad, acquired full proficiency in Turkish and became a Turkish citizen in 1943, when Nazis took away his citizenship. He taught legal philosophy and legal sociology in both Istanbul and Ankara and wrote and published his lectures (among them Hukuk Felsefesi ve Hukuk Sosyolojisi Dersleri [Lectures on the Philosophy and Sociology of Law, 1949]) in Turkish. The steady scholarly output of this cross-national, translational endeavor not only established an academically solid institutional structure for the Turkish university of the early republican period, but it also secured, in Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation as Überleben and Fortleben of the original text, the preservation and propagation of an intellectual legacy diminished, even impoverished by bans on ideas and by book burnings and later misplaced or lost during transit. In this case, translation in its mission of transmission and dissemination remains, true to Benjamin’s vision, a redemptive practice that ensures the survival of cultural remembrances.

However, there was some disagreement among German professors with regard to the value of translated education. Like Rüstow, Rudolf Nissen, who enjoyed a very successful professional sojourn in Istanbul, maintained that translation in the hands of its capable practitioners benefited the two languages in transaction, since both the lecturer and the translator had to strive for economy and precise idiom. However, there were others who felt that since Turkish lacked the vocabulary for certain disciplinary discourses, such as astronomy, concepts were all but lost in translation (Widmann 233). Ironically, one of the reasons for the inadequate vocabulary of Turkish as a language of Wissenschaft can be found in the radical language reform that in its attempt to replace the Arabic and Persian words, that had become an integral part of Turkish culture with “essential” or pure Turkish words, caused a chaos of terminology. In the process, many philosophical and scientific concepts that lent Turkish its rich, albeit morphologically and semantically hybrid, conceptual grounding were systematically dropped from the language. The fight for the Turkish language, between the moderates who argued that language could not be changed by decree and the purists who considered this stance a “counter-revolutionary mentality,” still goes on.3 This “translation” project was carried on by the members of the Türk Dil Kurumu (Turkish language association founded by Atatürk) who researched and collected words from surviving dialects, other Turkic languages, and pre-Ottoman texts. Some of these words were readily adopted by the population, others coexisted with their “archaic” counterparts but acquired different meanings, and still others were not accepted by the speakers as adequate terms for the ones they sought to replace. One of the difficulties the German professors encountered was the Turkish students’ poor command of their own language that resulted from the rushed modernization of Turkish. Thus, the professors who attempted to learn Turkish came up against the redoubled task of learning a totally unfamiliar language that itself was undergoing constant transformation. On the other hand, the alphabet reform, which was an integral part of language reform and perhaps its most radical component, was implemented with great success by Atatürk in 1928. The Arabic script was extremely ill suited to the phonetic nature of Turkish. For example, whereas Turkish has eight vowels, Arabic has only three. There was also no correspondence between consonants. Consequently, reading was guesswork. Due to the confusion caused by a script radically alien to the nature of Turkish, instruction in Turkish was so difficult that the language of instruction at the School of Medicine, established in 1827 during the Ottoman reign, was French (Güvenç 262).

There were many secondary schools in Istanbul at the time of the reform that offered instruction in other languages, including the German School. The impetus behind the various translation projects was to enrich the expressive capabilities of modern Turkish and elevate it to the status of a language of Wissenschaft. The slow but steady growth of Turkish as a language of ideas developed against a background of translation. What was ironic, however, was the coexistence of an extensive practice of translation with a passionately articulated uniqueness and moral superiority of Turkish nation and national identity. This paradox of the need for translation and resistance to it is eloquently expressed in Antoine Berman’s Experience of the Foreign, a study that argues that the major translation project of German romanticism articulated a deep desire to enrich German by incorporating the other: “Every culture resists translation, even as it has an essential need for it. The very aim of translation—to open up in writing a certain relation to the Other, to fertilize, what is One’s own through the meditation of what is Foreign—is diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure of every culture” (Berman 4). In the new Turkey of the 1930s and 1940s, the need for translation arose from the conditions of the historical moment; the Westernization reforms embraced a discourse of progress that entailed a radical translation from the alaturka (Turkish) to the alafranga (Frankish) way of life. On the other hand, as a late newcomer to the league of “Nation”s, Turkey adopted an essentialist grammar of linguistic and ethnic unity that would represent Turkish culture as an unadulterated whole. Yet the embrace of translation, as Berman has convincingly argued, is simultaneously an embrace of the foreign.

In a foreword dating from 1941 and included as a preface to all translations issued by the Ministry of Education, the then Minister of Education Yücel reconciles the desire for translation with a nationalist resistance to it by arguing that the wealthier a nation’s library of translations is, the higher its status among the nations of the civilized world. Yücel, a legendary reformer and educator, undertook, with the help of classical philologist Georg Rohde, the extensive project of translation of world classics into Turkish (Dünya Edebiyatından Tercümeler). In collaboration with his students, Rohde published Latin textbooks for high schools. Yücel had introduced Latin instruction into the high school curriculum, and Rohde’s students began teaching Latin at many secondary schools. Although the experiment with Latin instruction at the secondary school level was short-lived, Rohde’s many students carried on the classical tradition with distinction at the University of Ankara where he taught from 1935 to 1949. His Lingua Latina, a textbook in Turkish, coauthored with one of his star students, Samim Sinanoğlu, enjoyed several reprints (Widmann 286). Azra Erhat, another student, became a leading scholar and popularized classical mythology in a series of highly informative and well-written books.

Translation always entails a contract between two parties. The terms of this contract are best fulfilled when the transaction stipulated by the contract is not only linguistically but also culturally viable. The translation project that in various guises shaped the cultural policies of the early Turkish republic cannot be understood as a mere transmission of content. The professors who contributed most substantially both to their students’ Bildung and their own were those who chose not to reside in the ivory tower of intellectual migration. “Translation,” writes Berman, “is a radical reformulation of the idea of classical Bildung: what is one’s own or familiar gains access to itself or becomes conscious of itself only through the experience of the other” (Berman 162). Although Rüstow never gained mastery in Turkish, he was effective as a cultural translator, since his political past and sensibilities enabled him to understand the historical challenges facing the Turkish generation that was his charge. For many scholars biding their time in Istanbul in relative comfort and security and making little effort to communicate with their hosts, the trials of a war-torn Europe seemed like something from another planet—until the unstoppable German army came within eighty miles of the Turkish border. Franz von Papen, Hitler’s ambassador to Ankara, was ordered to revoke the passports of the Jewish professors, and the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda in Turkey backed by other non-refugee German establishments stepped up. The Turkish government, however, intervened vehemently in each case on behalf of the academics and offered all Turkish citizenship.

I need to note here, however, that the picture did not seem so rosy from all sides. A few refugees, who were dismissed due to their reluctance or inability to learn Turkish, expressed very bitter feelings toward their Turkish hosts upon landing on the greener pastures of Great Britain and the United States. A few others, among them students of Spitzer, when safely settled into the comfort of American research universities, criticized the lack of resources or the standard of living in Turkey. Shaw notes that they were quick to blame the Turks, “who had in fact given them refuge when no other country would. Part of the problem was in attitude. Most of the refugees had been leading figures in Germany and elsewhere in western Europe and had treated even their German students with considerable arrogance, something which the democratically-minded Turks simply could not accept” (Shaw 11). Nevertheless, the disgruntled voices of a handful of refugees remain insignificant in the larger context of a mutually beneficial cultural exchange. Contrary to the well-known claim that Auerbach wrote Mimesis in Istanbul in a vacuum where he could not consult other scholarly works, both Neumark and Shaw state that the university was able to furnish the scholars with needed books and materials in record time, and Barry Rubin writes that Auerbach found some of the books he needed in the library of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Vatican’s legate in Istanbul who was to become Pope John XXIII (Rubin 44). Whereas Auerbach had serious apprehensions about the lack of intellectual community in his Istanbul exile and worried about not having access to Western libraries, Rüstow was risking his life along with Hans Willbrandt, another refugee professor in Istanbul, by collaborating under the code name “Magnolia” with American and British intelligence in Turkey against the Nazis (Rubin 172–76, 280). Ernst Reuter, who had spent two years in a concentration camp, became one of the leaders of the anti-Nazi community in Turkey. He established the chair for urban planning at the University of Ankara, a discipline that was to become an integral component of Turkish modernization. Later as mayor of Berlin, Reuter oversaw the operation of the Berlin Luftbrücke (crisis airlift).

Perhaps not so surprisingly, the professors that participated most actively in a dialogue with their hosts were social scientists whose critical apparatus enabled them to register and decode social change. Whether they translated their own works, or had them translated, or wrote in Turkish, which was conceived in advance as a gesture of self-translation or a form of double translation, they generated a new kinship between Turkish and German in such a way that each language became richer relative to its former self by incorporating the nuances and traces of the other. Whereas neither Leo Spitzer’s brilliant textual analyses nor Auerbach’s widely read and referenced Mimesis reveal even the faintest trace of the exilic experience and its attendant other-cultural encounters, Rüstow’s Ortsbestimmung, in its intellectual mood and voice, bears witness to exile in a land undergoing major social transformations and trying to make sense of its peculiar destiny. In his preface to the book that was conceived and written in Istanbul, Rüstow explains the reason for undertaking this study in a most eloquent fashion. He states that the catastrophic events of history require that the sociologist and historian investigate the causes of the catastrophe and determine the place of those affected in the historical continuum. He voices his gratitude to the Turkish nation that offered him the space and the time that made the pursuit of this inquiry possible. Exile offered him the detachment from lived history necessary for a critical observation and reassessment of the latter (Rüstow xxiii).

For an exile, the acquisition of the host country’s language is virtually a contractual obligation. As mentioned before, the contracts of German academic exiles actually contained a clause that required them to learn Turkish. This contract, Derrida would claim, like “[a]n agreement or obligation of any sort … can only take place … in translation, that is, only if it is simultaneously uttered both in my tongue and the other’s. If it takes place only in one tongue, whether it be mine or the other’s, there is no contract possible” (“Roundtable on Translation,” 125). When Fritz Arndt, the chemist, Neumark, the economist, Hirsch, the legal philosopher, or Rohde, the classical philologist, wrote in Turkish, their “translated” texts no longer followed the German script. This writing as translation implied a memory without moorings ready to enter a bilateral agreement with the other. By turning to Turkish, these scholars were able to re-form and reclaim a German that was ideologically manipulated as a tool of oppression and exclusion. Neumark recalls an incident that more than anything else—the brutality of Nazism, the loss of his position, and the fear of exile—he regarded as the most devastating blow to his personal and collective identity. On that fateful day that turned out to be his last at the University of Frankfurt before going into exile, Neumark saw,

mit tiefster Erschütterung am Schwarzen Brett einen Anschlag des NS-Studentenbundes, indem unter anderem die Forderung erhoben wurde, künftig alle Publikationen von jüdischen Professoren als “Übersetzungen aus dem Hebräischen” zu bezeichnen (eine Sprache die mir unbekannt war). Diese Diffamierung von Menschen, die nie etwas anderes als Deutsch ihre Muttersprache betrachtet und geliebt hatten, zeigte mir endgültig, daß mein Wirken an einer Institution, die nur um des äußeren Scheinens willen fortfuhr, sich “Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität” zu nennen, nicht mehr möglich war. (Neumark 44)

[in profound shock on the blackboard a notice of the Nazi student union which, among other claims, stated that from now on all publications of the Jewish professors would be considered “translations from the Hebrew” [a language I did not know]. This defamation of people who had never considered anything other than German as their mother tongue and who loved it as such finally convinced me that it was no longer possible for me to work at an institution which continued to call itself the “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University” for appearances’ sake].

This painful memory is corroborated by widespread evidence that showed how Jewish intellectuals and writers were forcibly expelled from the only mother tongue they knew. A poster with the heading, “Wider den deutschen Geist” (Against the German Spirit), prepared for the Nazi campaign that began on April 13, 1933 made, among others, the following pronouncement: “Der Jude kann nur jüdisch denken. Schreibt er deutsch, dann lügt er” (The Jew can only think Jewish; if he writes German, then he is lying). The poster also stated that since the Jew was an alien (Fremdling), censors had to stipulate that Jewish works be published in Hebrew. If they came out in German, they had to be categorized as translation (Übersetzung).4

There are multiple ironies darkly lurking in these statements. The double etymology of Übersetzung shows that it means both translation and transporting or ferrying over (when its verb form is transitive) or crossing over (intransitive). The German Jewish scholars in question did not write or publish in Hebrew. Like Neumark, most probably had little or no knowledge of the language, but the Nazi ideology read in their works a translated German and not the authentic, pure one. Furthermore, in that context, the status of translation was clearly inferior to language “unadulterated” by translation. The Jews were transported out of their language and later to concentration camps. Those who crossed over the border, who were able to escape, lived a life in translation. They crossed over from one meaning of Übersetzung to the other, from one Übersetzung to another Übersetzung. Istanbul is a city astride two continents, separated by the strait of the Bosphorus. Although there are now two suspension bridges connecting the two shores of the strait, during Neumark’s Istanbul years ferry boats were the only means of crossing the Bosporus. Since the University of Istanbul is on the European side, and Neumark, Rüstow, and some of their colleagues lived on the Asian side, they were “ferried over” every day, thus leading a life of double Übersetzung.

It is no small irony that although Neumark wrote most of his work in German, his mother tongue, the Nazis censured his books as translations from the Hebrew. But when he wrote in Turkish, in this case, his other tongue, his writing was, in effect, a translation from the German. In the latter context, translation is understood as a historical necessity articulated against a background of social, political, and cultural exchanges. In this historical context, translation, positioned before and after language, becomes, as the German Romantics and Benjamin have shown, a “Potenzierung” (potentiation or exponentiation) of language. In the critical space for exchange and negotiation afforded by translation, Neumark can now reclaim the language from which he was forcefully exiled. The history of German migration to Turkey illustrates the dialectic cycle of loss and restitution whereby amends are made, however gradually, for the theft of language and history. What was recovered in language and memory from the shards of a once humanist culture became a significant contribution to the educational reforms of a new nation In turn, like many countries that offered German academics refuge, Turkey placed a significant amount of German intellectual capital in escrow until it could be returned home safely—with interest.

NOTES

1. According to figures given by Stanford Shaw, between 1940 and 1950, 76 works of literature from Germany, 180 from France, 46 from England, 64 from Russia, and 13 from Italy were translated into Turkish. In addition, 28 works were translated from Latin, 76 from Ancient Greek, and 23 from Persian and Arabic. See Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust, p. 8, n. 19.

2. Horst Widmann quotes from a letter Rüstow wrote to his colleague Andreas Schwarz before the latter’s arrival in Istanbul. Here Rüstow reassures Schwarz that consecutive oral translation of a lecture works very well. Horst Widmann, Exil und Bildungshilfe: Die deutsche akademische Emigration in die Türkei nach 1933 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1973), p. 241. Others who remember Rüstow, including Neumark and Rüstow’s son, Dankwart Rustow, point to Rüstow’s ease of communication with his students and hosts. Despite imperfect language skills in Turkish, Rüstow clearly shared in the discourse of his Turkish colleagues and friends.

3. For a more comprehensive historical context of Atatürk’s cultural reforms, see Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, rev. ed. (London and New York: Tauris, 1980), pp. 194–203.

4. This poster was on display at the exhibition that was a re-creation of the exhibition called “Entartete Kunst” (degenerate art) that the Nazis opened on March 19, 1937 in Munich as part of an all out attack on modern art. The discovery of some of the installation photographs of the Munich exhibition made the reconstruction of the original one possible at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through the initiative of Stephanie Barron, curator of twentieth-century art at the museum, who assembled 150 pieces from the original show. After its initial display in Los Angeles, the exhibition traveled to the The Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution. I saw the poster and copied its contents in my notebook during my visit to the Smithsonian where “ ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany” was on display from October 8, 1991 to January 5, 1992.

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