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.