The Unlikely Architects of Modern Turkish National Identity?

200 Pages·2012·1.13 MB·English

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 the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by
Professor Celia Applegate
Department of History
Arts, Sciences and Engineering
School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester
Rochester, 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 between
2004 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 for acting 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 the
strength 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 one
of 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 Reconstruction
of 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
1

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 “State Theatre 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).
2

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 Atatürk 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 Atatürk and his cadre started implementing cultural reforms in the late
1920s, 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 these émigrés
3

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 Jewish
Germans, 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 wider 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 through the nation’s arts and music.4 Kemal Atatürk associated

2 Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the
1930s 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 of

the Family of Nations was anomalous, because her civilization fell short of that of Western states.”Hedley
Bull (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