This paper, on the basis of their publications and yet unexplored correspondence, shall examine the transnational networks of selected German émigré professors who entered Istanbul after 1933 as part of a group of up to hundred Western academics. As part of the Turkish modernization project they were put in charge of establishing Istanbul Üniversitesi as a Western-style university: a specific configuration of academic exile which has received rather little scholarly attention. Guided by questions of access and accessibility, to resources and audiences, the paper will show how the opportunity structures of such networks in interplay with the local conditions shaped the specific exile experience of the émigré professors in question. By looking at their work and the different networks in which the literary historian Erich Auerbach, the orientalist Hellmut Ritter, the sociologist Alexander Rüstow and the administrative scientist Ernst Reuter were involved, it will highlight the scope and limits of their professional endeavors such as reforming their respective discipline’s education tracks while working on monograph projects (Rüstow, Auerbach), reorganizing the Istanbul archives (Ritter) or the city’s infrastructure (Reuter). Conceptualized as histoire croisée, the paper investigates into the mutually constitutive local and transnational levels on which the professors acted and by which they were affected. By investigating into the specificity of Istanbul as place of exile, the paper presents a critique of an overly generic and normative notion of ‘intellectual exile’ as it repeatedly surfaces in accounts of the history of intellectual migration. Within the latter the academic migration from countries under Nazi influence to the Western allied countries exerts considerable and problematic influence in terms of providing a ‘benchmark experience’ whose local specificity tends to be ignored. Similarly and most notably Edward Said, who sometimes explicitly referred to Erich Auerbach’s activity in Istanbul, has described ‘intellectual exile’ as a marginal, half-detached and half-involved position. Eventually, it is less understood as a concrete historical experience than idealized as a conditio sine qua non of the critical intellectual as such, generalized as a ‘mental state’ allowing for critical insights. Even the critical ‘re-localization’ of Auerbach’s exile experience within the Turkish context (Konuk) still suffered from such normative implications. Instead, exploring the local and transnational level alike, the paper sets out to capture and differentiate the levels of marginalization, forms of engagement and critical reflexivity of different émigrés in Istanbul in the first place.