Erich Auerbach and the Humanist Reform to the Turkish Education System

With its predominantly Muslim citizenry and geographical location linking two continents, Turkey has become a battleground for the definition of "Europeanness." Parallel to the debate over whether Turkey can legitimately represent Europe and so join the European Union runs the debate over how to preserve "Turkishness" in a time of change. In fact, these debates are not new. The anxiety about losing a sense of national difference while conforming to European culture—however defined—is rooted in the early years of the Turkish Republic when European concepts of modernity were adopted to serve the country's domestic purposes and international aspirations. With the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk introduced a series of modernization reforms designed to break with the Ottoman past. This article focuses on a highly significant aspect of those Europeanization reforms, namely the restructuring of the humanities, something that was to play a central role in the dissemination of European ideas and the reconceptualization of Turkish citizens as Europeans. Modeling itself on the European system, Istanbul University was refounded as a modern institution of higher learning in 1933, an event coinciding with the dismissal of German academics on anti-Semitic and political grounds from German universities. Taking advantage of the flight from National Socialism, Turkish universities immediately hired more than forty German scholars to facilitate the westernization of tertiary institutions. These modernization measures, steered by both Turkish reformers and German émigrés, promoted identification with Europe while simultaneously emphasizing Turkishness as a common ground for the new nation. This article investigates the role of German emigrants as ambivalent mediators within Turkey's modernization process. Because of his pivotal role in the humanities in Germany, Turkey, and the United States, this article focuses on the Romance scholar Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) and the eleven years he spent in Turkey. Investigating Auerbach's role in Turkey allows me to show how the national and the humanist movement were intertwined at this crucial juncture in Turkey's identification with the West. Erich Auerbach was hired to chair the Faculty for Western Languages and Literatures at Istanbul University and produced his most significant scholarship during his tenure in Turkey (1936–1947). As one of the greatest humanist critics of his time, Auerbach gained prominence with the publication of his seminal work, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature in 1946. This achievement paved the way for his career at Pennsylvania State University, then Princeton University, and finally Yale University. Included among his methodological contributions was a new approach for studying the representation of reality through narrative style, an approach that greatly influenced a range of fields, including literary theory, history, comparative literature, and cultural history.

Edward Said suggested that for Auerbach the "Orient and Islam stood for the ultimate alienation from and opposition to Europe, the European tradition of Christian Latinity, as well as to the putative authority of ecclesia, humanistic learning, and cultural community."¹Pace Said, I show that the concept of modernity in 1930s Turkey was based on European learning—specifically on the humanistic tradition. This is not, of course, to downplay the significance of the Orientalist stereotyping of Turkey in the Western European imagination. I want to emphasize, however, that Turkish experiences informed Auerbach's view of Istanbul in more complex and powerful ways than discourses that set up a dichotomy between the Orient and Occident. I suggest that Said's reading of Auerbach as an isolated, dislocated, and estranged European intellectual in an Oriental world serves Said's own rhetorical purposes as an intellectual in exile; what it overlooks is the fact that Istanbul University in the 1930s was, for good reason, dubbed "Berlin dis , inda en büyük Alman Üniversitesi" [the biggest German university besides Berlin].²

Istanbul was not only a city in which Auerbach met many other German scholars who fled National Socialism; it was also a place with a familiar history. For Auerbach personally, Istanbul was linked to the classical heritage of Western Europe, something that allowed him to identify with the city. This is clear from...