Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination by Stefan Ihrig

Author:Stefan Ihrig [Ihrig, Stefan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, Modern, 20th Century, Middle East, Turkey & Ottoman Empire
ISBN: 9780674368378
Google: F_Q9BQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard UP
Published: 2014-11-20T22:26:00+00:00

5

The New Turkey

Nazi Visions of a Modern Völkisch State

“Just as Adolf Hitler had created the new Germany, and Mussolini the new Italy,” Reventlow’s Reichswart wrote in 1933, “so the modern Turkey is Mustafa Kemal’s creation alone and at the same time it is proof of what a paramount Führer personality can make out of a country and a nation.”1 This sentence encapsulates almost every aspect of the Nazis’ perception of the New Turkey. Given that its creation and goals were parallel to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s, that it was proof of the Führer principle, and that Atatürk was considered a model Führer, as we saw in Chapter 4, we would expect Nazi descriptions of the New Turkey to be nothing other than extremely positive. Indeed, the Nazi vision of Atatürk’s state does not disappoint: “Turkey is the most modern state of the twentieth century,” exclaimed Froembgen in his book on Atatürk in 1935.2 Kemalism itself was often described as a “national-revolutionary ideology.” The ruling and constituting party was, as Nazi commentators saw it, “republican, nationalist, völkisch, laicist.”3 This was a “modern, authoritarian Republic” that was at the same time extremely revolutionary.4 Very similar to the characterization of Ankara as “the youngest republic” in the early 1920s, in the Third Reich the New Turkey was still viewed as a most revolutionary state, where—the Nietzschean influence is conspicuous—what was taking place was nothing less than a “revaluation of all values” or a “total revolution.” It embodied revolution: “In a revolutionary act the state was born, in an equally revolutionary act it was given civilization.”5 Similarly Mikusch in his Atatürk biography emphasized:

Turkey in its contemporary form is not a simple copy of Europe or what Europe would look like with the adoption of numerous occidental institutions.… Her spirit is, through a reconnection to the oldest traditions of the nation, purely Turkish; the shape of the new state, however, how its founder has created it, refers to the coming time of the twentieth century, beyond the old Europe.6

These characterizations of Turkey might not be surprising, given what we have already seen in earlier chapters. But we must remember that Turkey in the 1930s was, by all standards, still a backward country—it was developing rapidly, but it was not comparable to Western industrialized countries. Nazi perceptions about the New Turkey were, thus, far from “objective” and were not about a status quo. Turkey was to them the most modern country because of its ideology, political tools, and goals. It was a work in progress, just like National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy. And obviously Nazi Germany saw in Turkey what it wanted to see. Thus the image of Turkey in the Third Reich also allows us to draw conclusions about the Nazi self-image in relation to National Socialist modernity.7 This is also explains why Nazi Germany’s image of this revolutionary and rapidly developing country was, paradoxically, rather static. Whether in 1933 or in the middle of World War II, the descriptions do not vary significantly. And

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