John P. Birkelund Fellows in the Humanities

Azade Seyhan

Class of Fall 2019

Fairbank Professor in the Humanities, Department of German

Bryn Mawr College

Exile in Translation: Exodus of German Culture to Turkey (1933-1945)

In her Academy project, Seyhan focuses on a unique cultural encounter between professors exiled from Hitler’s Germany and institutions of Turkish higher education that offered them refuge and intellectual community. Although the humanist practice of Bildung was foreclosed in Germany during the National Socialist years, this legacy survived in exile. Ernst Reuter, for example, belonged to an eminent group of émigré German architects and city planners who played a major role in the modernization of urban spaces and edifices as markers of a westernized Turkish identity. At the University of Ankara, he established the discipline of urban planning, where today the Ernst Reuter Center for Applied Research in Settlements and Urban Planning continues to honor his work. “The safeguarding of intellectual heritages in this fashion contributes to a renewed understanding of texts that have shaped cultural movements across borders,” Seyhan writes. Her project takes up several themes: the survival of an incoming culture and exile scholarship; the role of translation in the economies of a national culture; the imperative of cross-disciplinary work for the exiled scholar; and the conditions for the emergence of an alternative critique of modernity at a non-European site.

Azade Seyhan is the Fairbank Professor in the Humanities, a professor of comparative literature and German, and affiliated faculty in philosophy and Middle Eastern studies at Bryn Mawr College. She completed her BA at Robert College in Istanbul and MA degrees in Near Eastern languages and literatures and German at the University of Washington, where she also earned her PhD. Seyhan is the author of Heinrich Heine and the World Literary Map (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context (MLA, 2008), Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton, 2001), and Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (California, 1992). Her most recent articles have appeared in Telos, Text+Kritik, German Quarterly, and the Journal of Turkish Literature, and her book chapters in Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures (Northwestern, 2016) and The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature (Cambridge, 2014). Seyhan has been a keynote speaker at conferences at Stockholm University, Boğaziçi University, University of Bucharest, Central European University, University of Pennsylvania, and Copenhagen University. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Ford Foundation.