Auerbach in Istanbul: Exile, Transnationalism, and Modernity

FAIN: FA-53309-07

Kader Konuk
Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382)

This project focuses on the Jewish German philologist Erich Auerbach, a pivotal figure in the humanities who after his dismissal from Germany in 1936 emigrated to Turkey. His itinerant life and the transnational nature of his work call for an investigation into the relationship between the humanities and concepts of modernity, nation, and exile in East and West. This book project raises questions about the role of the émigré in the Europeanization of Turkey, the metamorphosis of German philology in a transnational context, the impact of National Socialists on Turkish universities, and the place of the Jewish emigrant in Turkish historiography.

Associated Products

East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Istanbul (Book)
Title: East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Istanbul
Author: Kader Konuk
Abstract: East West Mimesis follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. Kader Konuk asks why philologists like Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. She challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, the book provides a new approach to the study of East-West relations. Central to the book is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. Konuk draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17993
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph

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