Running away from the persecution of the Nazis, hundreds of German professionals found a safe haven in Turkey in the 1930s. Ironically, the refugees, who had just lost their German citizenship because of their Jewish background, proved of great use to the young Turkish Republic in its nation-building project, precisely because of their German heritage and expertise. 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. While the presence of the émigré scholars contributed to its success, it also contributed to its failure because it strengthened the resentment among the populace against the rigid Kemalist policies pursued in the 1930s and 40s. Nation-building through music and the arts, seemingly a rather innocuous aspect of the Kemalist project, became instead one of the most contentious of all its aspects. The cultural transformation pursued by the Kemalists has been contested and controversial almost from the start and increasingly so in recent decades. But it 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. Thus even while the German émigrés contributed significantly to the success of Kemalist nation-building, a strong resentment against the émigrés, the so-called “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. My research aims to shed light on modernity in a non-Western context by uncovering the stories of the most under-researched refugee groups: artists, musicians, and humanities professors. By examining the transnational encounters in music, visual arts, and humanities education from the 1930s to the 1970s, I aim to explore how the cross-territorial forces in the form of ideas and a real dialogue between multiple actors conditioned the Turkish nation-building processes as a dynamic space of decision-making.