Month: December 2008

Vol. 48 No. 4 (October 2007)

http://etc.technologyandculture.net/2007/12/17/the-german-turk-miracle-arnold-reismans-turkeys-modernization/#respond

Yakup Bektas

This book, long overdue, brings to light the little-known story of how Turkey welcomed (and thus saved) several hundred prominent, predominantly Jewish, intellectuals, scientists, doctors, legal scholars, architects, librarians, and musicians fleeing the Nazis. They came from Germany and other German-speaking parts of Europe, mainly Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, with a number also from France and Spain. Reminding us that the Ottoman Empire had long offered refuge to the persecuted, among them the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, Arnold Reisman tells in Turkey’s Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Atatürk’s Vision (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2006, pp. xxvii+571, $30) how the empire’s young heir, Turkey, again provided a safe haven from 1933 through World War II. In the absence of this Turkish effort, Reisman shows how the knowledge and expertise of these Jewish scientists and artists might have been lost forever, and he also shows how much Turkey’s own modernization and educational and social reforms owe to them.

What was left of the Ottoman Empire after World War I became today’s Republic of Turkey in 1923 following a difficult war of independence led by Mustafa Kemal, later called Atatürk, the republic’s founding father and first president (1923–38). Unceasing conflict had left the country impoverished and greatly reduced in territory and population, with all of its institutions in dire need of reorganization. A French-inspired model that the “Young Turks” had been designing for the disintegrating Ottoman Empire since the late nineteenth century began to take shape under the leadership of Atatürk. He envisioned a nation-state based not on religion or ethnicity but on “science” and positivist philosophy. The caliphate was abolished in 1924 and four years later the Latin alphabet was adopted to replace the Arabic script. Turkey’s new secular laws and dress codes emulated Western European models.

To help with this modernization effort and in particular with university and educational reforms, Atatürk’s government invited European experts to Turkey and also sent a large number of students to Europe for academic training beginning in 1927. Shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, all professors of Jewish ancestry were dismissed, and Austria followed suit after its annexation by Germany. Atatürk’s government opened Turkey to these academics, offering them the best positions in Turkey’s few fledgling colleges at a time when Jews were elsewhere refused not only jobs but even visas. This intellectual influx suited Atatürk’s aims well and was particularly important to his radical program for reforming higher education on the European university model. In 1933, the old Istanbul Darülfünun was renamed Istanbul University, signifying its transformation from the “madrassa”-based system to the modern university.

In autumn that year, the first group of more than thirty professors arrived to start teaching at Istanbul University, among them pathology professor Philipp Schwartz, who, on behalf of a new organization established to help dismissed German professors find employment abroad, had negotiated an agreement with the Turkish government that was hailed as “the German-Turk miracle” (p. 9). Even Albert Einstein is believed to have been considering the Turkey option as he was waiting to hear from Princeton, which he had been told “would not hire a Jew” (pp. 318–20). Led by émigré professors, Istanbul University earned the rank of “the best German university” of the time, an official German document of 1939 describing it as having “turned Jewish” (p. 279). Indeed, the overwhelming majority of these “German professors”—as they were called in Turkey—were Jewish, although there were also a good number of non-Jewish anti-Nazi intellectuals and political dissidents, including Ernest Reuter, who became Berlin’s mayor after the war.

Turkish contracts and invitations even brought some out of concentration camps. When a son of chemistry professor Fritz Arndt was caught fighting the Germans during their invasion of Poland, the Turkish government intervened and got him to safety in Istanbul. But nothing was automatic: the deals had to be negotiated with and approved by the German government. Germany tried to persuade Turkey to employ only members of the National Socialist Party, but strong economic ties and Germany’s desire to secure an alliance made it possible for Turkey to bargain about such matters.

Apart from positions at Istanbul University, the émigré professors were also given posts at what became Istanbul Technical University (1944) and Ankara University (1946), as well as other public institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts. The School of Language, History, and Geography (Ankara, 1935) could hardly be imagined without émigré professors such as Assyriologist Benno Landsberger, Hittiotologist Hans Gustav Güterbock, Sinologist Wolfram Eberhard, and Indologist Walter Ruben, who not only established these disciplines there but also became world-regarded authorities.

Reisman puts the number of these émigrés at “approximately 300 academicians and 50 technicians and supporting staff” (p. 9), or more than 1,000 men and women with their families. The émigré professors were offered high salaries, with many being honored as “ordinarius” or distinguished professor, and the list is very long: Erich Auerbach, who wrote his much-acclaimed literary critique Mimesis while in Turkey; philosopher-mathematicians Hans Reichenbach and Richard von Mises, two prominent figures of the “Berlin Group”; philosopher and Diderot expert Herbert Dieckmann; Orientalist Helmut Ritter; law scholars Ernst H. Hirsch and Andreas Schwarz; economists Alexander Rüstow, Alfred Isaac, and Wilhelm Röpke; biochemist Felix Haurowitz; botanist Alfred Heilbronn; physicist Arthur von Hippel; astrophysicist E. Finlay Freundlich; pediatrician Albert Eckstein; surgeon Rudolf Nissen; ophthalmologist Joseph Igersheimer; architect Clemens Holzmeister; opera director Carl Ebert; conductor Ernst Praetorius; composer Paul Hindemith. Among the women were applied mathematician Hilda Geiringer (von Mises) and architect and designer Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Reisman contrasts the egalitarian attitude toward women in Turkey (and Europe) with the situation in the United States, where he contends that sexual bias coupled with racial bias later made it difficult for these female émigrés to find tenured faculty positions.

Although conditions in Turkey in the 1930s and 1940s were not sufficiently ripe for reaping the full benefits of this émigré bonanza, as Reisman notes, its profound influence is still alive in Turkey, especially in the formation of its universities and the shaping of its higher educational programs. Émigré professors helped Atatürk and his modernizing elite define the foundations of a “modern society.” It is no exaggeration to say that they stimulated in Turkey an educational and intellectual renaissance that invigorated its institutions, from education to music, science and medicine to archaeology, architecture to urban planning, conservation to preventive health, and they promoted the establishment of libraries, theaters, and music halls.

The death of “the émigrés champion” Atatürk in late 1938 deeply saddened the newcomers. Ismet Inönü, the next president, continued Atatürk’s policy, but with a less charismatic leadership. When war broke out in 1939, Turkey resisted pressure from both sides to get involved. The German occupation of Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece terrified the émigrés, and Miriam Schmidt, at the time the teenage daughter of medical professor Karl Hellmann, recollects having “packed backpacks under our beds, in case the Germans came to Istanbul and we would have to flee to Anatolia” (pp. 396–7). Turkey’s government itself felt no less vulnerable. Although it managed to remain neutral, Turkey suffered economically. Serious inflation set in and by the end of the war food was rationed. Even highly paid professors felt the hardship, and after 1945 most of these refugee academics secured positions at the best colleges in the United States. Others left for Palestine (later Israel); some returned to Germany. After 1949, only a small number of them remained in Turkey, the departure of the others hastened not only by economic conditions but also by jealousies on the part of some Turkish professors and the opposition of Turkish nationalists to the renewal of their contracts.

The bulk of Reisman’s book is devoted to describing the background and personal stories of a large number of the émigrés, and their work and experience in Turkey. He draws on oral histories, personal correspondence with colleagues and friends (as many as seventeen of them corresponded with Albert Einstein), and memoirs, both published and unpublished, as well as his own correspondence with their descendants and students. Only in the last chapter does he depart from the main story, offering some insights into Turkey’s technological and industrial development by comparing it with Israel and India. His most valuable observation is that Turkish universities have until recently lacked a link to industry, perhaps primarily because funding has been provided exclusively by the state. But he does not tell whether this lack of cooperation with industry and other characteristics of Turkey’s current university system have anything to do with the German émigré legacy.

A number of minor shortcomings should be noted. Pages 397 and 399 have been transposed. Footnotes and references show imperfections, and online sources in particular are not fully digested. The book on the whole book could have been further refined, and the brief section on “Music and Islam” is too opinionated, especially relative to Iran and more particularly to the “expert” Reisman consulted there. The idea of “modernity” that emerges is simplistic, implying nothing less than a total assimilation to whatever is “Western.” But such flaws are trivial if not entirely irrelevant to the larger story.

Turkey’s Modernization ends with a quote from economist Fritz Neumark, an émigré who stayed in Istanbul until his retirement in 1953, expressing the “admiration and gratitude” toward Turkey on the part of “German scientists, politicians and artists who looked for and found shelter along the Bosporus during [a] difficult time” (p. 465). Reisman deserves the highest praise for shedding light on a major intellectual exodus of the twentieth century, especially because this aspect has drawn little attention in English. Although the role of émigré scientists and intellectuals in the transformation of other areas is well known, the story of Turkey’s experience deserves further study. This book stimulates such an endeavor and provides an excellent start.

Copyright© 2007, the Society for the History of Technology