Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Humanism goes east -- Turkish humanism -- Mimicry in modern Turkey : the place of German and Turkish Jews -- Germany on the Bosporus : Nazi conspiracies and émigré politics -- Writing Mimesis in Istanbul -- Epilogue : Turkey's humanist legacy

This article focuses on the reception of Kafka in Turkey in conjunction with the status and treatment of ethnic and religious minorities. Investigating the reception and appropriation of Kafka in Turkey reveals the ongoing effort to secure freedom of speech in a country that is marked by a long history of Turkification and Islamisation. The strong tradition of Kafka reception in Turkey sensitises readers to the kinds of literary allusions and rhetorical flourishes that are associated with the Prague author. Characters such as Herr K. and Gregor Samsa, labyrinthine narratives and the motif of estrangement left a lasting imprint on literary texts that openly challenge or circumvent censorship. This article argues that Kafka became a seminal figure for writers in Turkey, writers whose investment was not necessarily in Kafka's Jewishness but in specific narrative techniques that allowed them to develop their own literature of resistance. This article analyses four novels in this regard - Ferit Edgü's Hakkâri'de bir Mevsim (1977), Erhan Bener's Böcek (1982), Bilge Karasu's Gece (1985), and Orhan Pamuk's Kar (2004).

AbstractThe place of Jews was highly ambiguous in the newly founded Turkish Republic: In 1928 an assimilationist campaign was launched against Turkish Jews, while only a few years later, in 1933, German scholars—many of them Jewish—were taken in so as to help Europeanize the nation. Turkish authorities regarded the emigrants as representatives of European civilization and appointed scholars like Erich Auerbach to prestigious academic positions that were vital for redefining the humanities in Turkey. This article explores the country's twofold assimilationist policies. On the one hand, Turkey required of its citizens—regardless of ethnic or religious origins—that they conform to a unified Turkish culture; on the other hand, an equally assimilationist modernization project was designed to achieve cultural recognition from the heart of Europe. By linking historical and contemporary discourses, this article shows how tropes of Jewishness have played—and continue to play—a critical role in the conception of Turkish nationhood. The status of Erich Auerbach, Chair of the Faculty for Western Languages and Literatures at İstanbul University from 1936 to 1947, is central to this investigation into the place of Turkish and German Jews in modern Turkey.

The multilingualism and polyphony of Jewish literary writing around the globe requires a collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary investigation into the methods of researching and teaching literature. This volume presents case studies from a broad range of approaches to Jewish literatures across different languages, including Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Yiddish.