This paper will analyze prominent Turkish novelist Sabahattin Ali’s rather neglected novel “Kürk Mantolu Madonna / The Madonna in the Fur Coat” (1943) through the intertextuality performed by the author. Ali adopted the form of Sacher-Masoch’s famous novel “Venus in Furs” and incorporated many elements of “Venus’” content into his novel “Kürk.” In addition, Ali performed intertextuality to display the contending repertoires of the so-called “East” and “West.” Given the author’s prominent role in the “Westernization” project managed by the Turkish government between the 1920s and 1940s, it is very difficult to determine which side Ali took in the heated debate of “Westernization.” Was he opposing the Westernization project and its nullifying effects or was he an ardent supporter of connecting Western humanism to Turkish humanism? This paper argues that Ali took neither of the sides. Ali’s novel “Kürk” is a compelling representation of the contemporary debates on the social and cultural change brought by the Westernization project. Through the questioning of this representation, this paper offers a new interpretation to Ali’s “social-realist” authorship, which is construed around his first novel “Kuyucakli Yusuf.” In addition, the comparative method applied in this paper will suggest a new approach to the interpretation of the Westernization project in the 1940s, the close cultural and technical relations between Turkish and German contexts, and it will ask new questions on the comparative methodology and its functions. This paper seeks to contribute to the cluster of scholarship on early Republican Turkey’s Westernization paradigm, Turkish Literature, and the relation between Turkey and Germany before World War II.

Since the 1990s, German Studies—whether conceived as a philological, intercultural, or comparative field—has been fundamentally reorganized by what Tom Cheesman calls “Turkish settlement” (2007) and by what Leslie Adelson calls German literature’s “Turkish turn”(2005). Nonetheless, preponderant modes of German statescraft, cultural policy, naturalization schemata, and literary production continue to selectively incorporate a closed set of Turkish “cultural fables” (Brown 2003). These are sometimes referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as the ‘food, folklore, and fun’ model of interculturality. Simultaneously, however, a much more profound and unspectacular transformation can be traced in the way ethnic Germans and post-migrant German Turks practice civic and cultural autochthony in the wake of mass Turkish migration, giving way to a chronic and productive Unbehagen in Almanya (unsettledness in Germany) that often eludes scholarly attention. This talk will call on the Berlin-based author Zafer ?enocak’s Turkish-language novellas Ko?k (The Residence, 2008) and Alman Terbiyesi (German Education, 2007) as figural touchstones through which to explore the following questions: 1) What domains of Turkish-German historical subjectivity remain impervious to public representation and scholarly analysis in 2013, and why? 2) What epistemological and methodological lacunae persist in the way German Studies operationalizes its intercultural and/or comparative “Turkish turn”? 3) What projects, curricular transformations, and research trajectories might emerge from a serious disciplinary engagement with the first two questions?

Benjamin wrote one of the most influential and earliest theorizations of modernity in his critical writings on modern art and in his posthumously published The Arcades Project (1940). Benjamin’s project is to write Parisian nineteenth-century history as an Ur-history of the urban civilization of bourgeois capitalism. While Benjamin sought to produce a history of modernity out of the material culture of the nineteenth-century Paris, Tanp?nar in Five Cities (1946) tried to sketch out social, cultural and historical setting of five Turkish cities. In this sequence of essays combining travel writing, memoir, public historiography and fiction, Tanp?nar draws on the Seljuk and Ottoman imperial past in an effort to create a vision of Turkish history. However, rather than recollecting a dead past to reach an identiterian unity in the present, the forgotten and repressed aspects of the past haunts the present with its ultimate difference and distance. This paper aims to explore the parallels in these two texts in their direct or unintentional questioning of modern illusions such as cultural myths of progress, of historical causality, of a sanctified tradition and of a dead past. Benjamin and Tanp?nar sought to map a cultural history of modernity out of urban life and landscape in very different historical and cultural contexts. They tried to establish a different relation of the present to the past that overcame binaries of modern and tradition, past and present- a dialectical endeavor that eventually proves to be incomplete. Nergis Erturk recently argued for the urgency of brining these Tanp?nar and Benjamin together as critics and writers of melancholia of modernism’s fallen languages. In different ways, the writings of both have shaped the way modernism and modernity are perceived today in their respective communities. Tanp?nar’s literary and critical practices complicate issues of tradition, novelty and memory, which lie at the heart of the experience and the culture of modernity as theorized by Benjamin. Drawing on Bes Sehir and Arcades, this paper explores their expression of the inability of the modern subject to experience in the old, true sense of the term and how they live in a present of successive and regular intervals, cut off from past and future.

Large-scale translation movements were seminal for the development of both a modern Turkish and German national literary culture. Yet while German authors utilized their translations to posit a unique sense of cosmopolitan Germanness, Turkish authors viewed the need to translate as a sign of their literary belatedness vis-à-vis the “West.” My paper questions how comparing the Turkish history of translation to the German context can help to counter perceptions of a belated Turkish modernity and accusations of Ottoman culture as derivative to a Western model. As a case study, I examine the first Ottoman translations from German: Between 1886 and 1894, thirteen letters from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) were rendered into Ottoman by a total of five translators (Ahmet Rasim, Hüseyin Dani?, Halil Edip, Mustafa Faz?l, and one anonymous author), and published in leading literary journals of the time period. By reading these translations not simply against their “original,” but within a larger nexus of texts and cultural events, I develop a comparative model of translation as negotiation that can help to break down East/West and center/periphery dichotomies. In contrast to early Republican rhetoric, which criticized late Ottoman translation movements for their haphazardness, erroneousness and superficial adaptation of Western values, I read the Goethe translations as an important debate in practice that preceded the more theoretical literary debates of the 1897 Klâsikler Tart??mas? (Classics Debate). By placing differing translational decisions in dialogue with one another, I consider translation as an emergent form of literary criticism that expresses a form of Ottoman agency rather than belatedness. My reading of the Werther translations culminates in a discussion of Goethe’s own engagement with the Ottoman courtly poetry translated into German by the Orientalists Heinrich von Diez and Jospeh von Hammer-Purgstall. Goethe’s incorporation of Ottoman poetry into his West-östlicher Divan (1825) poses a challenge to many Ottomans’ refusal to view their own literary past as conducive to the concept of a “classic,” or as worthy of translation into Western European literary languages. At a time when Ottomans’ experimentation with new genres such as the novel led to a devaluation of Divan poetry, what did it mean for translators to view Goethe as a classical European author, when he himself valued Eastern forms of writing such as the Divan toward the end of his career?

This paper will attempt to discuss recent developments in the comparative study of the Ottoman Empire by examining its alliance with a number of overlapping yet different readings of the Mediterranean. At various points, and stemming from diverse contingencies, the Mediterranean has been explored as a topical cradle of historical meaning, inspiring a number of different understandings of the regional, the peripheral, the collective, and the comparative. From the second generation of the Annales school, in the post-war period, to the booming of postcolonial studies in the post-cold-war era, the history of the Eastern Mediterranean, in particular, has emerged as mirror of highly loaded methodological debates. In this context, the study of the Ottoman periphery has contributed a wide range of perspectives vis-à-vis mobility, connectivity, and fluidity in the plurality of Ottoman (and post-Ottoman) Mediterranean worlds. This paper will discuss the potentials and limitations of this growing literature together with the interrelated contexts of its creation. Building on both inclusions and exclusions, the analysis shall address why certain comparisons seem to be more preferable than others. Moreover, it will explore the connection between new framings of the region and recent developments. The rise of an allegedly moderate new regime of political Islam in Turkey; the profound socioeconomic crisis in the Mediterranean periphery of the EU; and the dangers and promises fostered by the Arab spring merge over the Mediterranean both as emerging new realities and as evolving novel concepts. To what extent does this fusion form new bridges between existing normative categories—such as West and East? And what are the resulting new boundaries?