East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey by Kader Konuk (review)

“I had to dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts.” This vision of Erich Auerbach, presented in the epilogue to his Mimesis, has stayed with critics for over half a century. We have imagined him, the European Jewish philologist, sitting out the war in Istanbul, stripped of his colleagues and his library, working from memory to shape a history of Western literary realism. As Kader Konuk shows in his detailed and pointedly argued new book, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey, this statement, and the scholarly romance it has engendered, is largely untrue. Istanbul held great archives of Greek and Roman manuscripts, museums filled with classical artifacts, and a newly energized university that sought to take advantage of the flight of European scholars to emerge at the forefront of the modernization movement spurred by Turkey’s first, modern president, Kemal Atatürk. The library held a respectable collection of literatures and scholarship in European languages. The city, too, had bookshops catering to European readers, and it had, as well, a Dominican monastery with a rich collection of patristic materials. In the library of San Pietro di Galata—overseen by Monsignor Roncalli, the man who would later become Pope John XXIII—Auerbach read deeply in the works of the Church Fathers, coming to understand the nature of medieval figurality. Konuk’s researches “undermine Auerbach’s assertion that Mimesis owed its genesis to the lack of ‘a rich and specialized library.’” Such an assertion, therefore, is less a statement of archival fact than it is “a rhetorical gesture.”

Konuk’s book exposes the vibrant intellectual and academic life of Istanbul during World War II. It shows, in great detail, the influx of European academics into a burgeoning modern state. The book draws on archival material accessible only to those who can read Turkish. And it synthesizes a range of theoretical and cultural positions about the relationship between the European and the “Orientalist” imaginations. Building on the provocations of Edward Said, but also qualifying his conclusions, Konuk investigates “how ideas about exile and isolation are connected to the trope of detachment in literary and literary critical discourses of the early twentieth century. Hence, I show how the trope of detachment, central to the aesthetics of modernism, came to assume a different meaning after the onset of mass emigration in 1933.”

In these ways, East West Mimesis moves beyond a biography of Auerbach or a narrative of his famous book. It is a cultural history of Turkey and humanism, Istanbul and modernity, Arabs and Ottomans and Jews. One of the most illuminating sections of this book reveals the place of Jews in Turkish historical identity. Istanbul had long had a Sephardic community, and Ottoman administrators had long used Jewish functionaries as administrative personnel. Konuk shows how these historical issues were reshaped during the 1930s, in particular, into discourses about authenticity. The influx of émigré Jews also changed the landscape of Turkish identity politics and ideals of “Europeanness.” Figures of Jewishness, Konuk argues, “shaped Turkish ideas about home, belonging, and the national character.” Added to these encounters were the Nazi figuration of the Jew as inauthentic mimic and the propaganda about Jewish identity fomenting in National Socialist circles in Istanbul itself. Konuk draws on archival documents and personal letters to reveal the complex relationships among Germans, Jews, and Turks.

A deft example of her technique is her story of the “Spitzer Affair,” a series of encounters between Leo Spitzer (the great German philologist and Auerbach’s predecessor at the University of Istanbul) and the Turkish authorities about antisemitic activities. Watching the German ambassador to Turkey refuse to shake the hand of the Jewish violinist Licco Amar after a performance in 1935, Spitzer wrote a passionate letter to the German vice-consul. This letter, which Konuk translates and publishes for the first time, offers important documentary evidence about the treatment of Jewish émigr...