{"id":649,"date":"2008-10-14T02:07:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-14T10:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=649"},"modified":"2008-10-14T02:07:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-14T10:07:00","slug":"erich-auerbach-letter-on-turkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/erich-auerbach-letter-on-turkey\/","title":{"rendered":"Erich Auerbach Letter on Turkey"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The German newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung<\/span> reproduces a 1938 letter Erich Auerbach sent to Johannes Oeschger from his Turkish exile. The occasion is no doubt the Frankfurt Book Fair where, as I mentioned a few days ago, Turkey is the main guest. I don’t have access to the whole letter (it is not in the online version) but here is my quick translation (plus the original) of the extract published this morning by the Perlentaucher<\/span><\/a>, describing the “process of a modern barbarisation<\/span>” of the country:<\/p>\n

The Turkish government “has to organize a country that is poor and unused to work, teach it modern and practical methods that will enable it to live and defend itself; and like everywhere else this happens in the name of a purist nationalism that destroys the living tradition, and that bases itself in part on completely fantastical conceptions of ur-times, and in part on modern-rationalist ideas. Piety is combatted, Islamic culture despised as an alien Arabic infiltration, one wants to be at the same time modern and purely Turkish, and it has gone so far that through the abolition of the old script, through the elimination of Arabic loan words and their replacement by Turkish neologisms and partly by European loan words, the language has been totally destroyed: no young person is any longer able to read the older literature \u2014 and there reigns a spiritual lack of direction that is extremely dangerous.”<\/p>\n

Die t\u00fcrkische Regierung “muss das arme und nicht arbeitsgewohnte Land organisieren, ihm moderne und praktische Methoden beibringen, damit es leben und sich wehren kann; und wie \u00fcberall geschieht das im Zeichen eines puristischen Nationalismus, der die lebende Tradition<\/b> zerst\u00f6rt, und sich teils auf ganz phantastische Urzeitvorstellungen, teils auf modern-rationale Gedanken st\u00fctzt. Die Fr\u00f6mmigkeit wird bek\u00e4mpft, die islamische Kultur als arabische \u00dcberfremdung<\/b> verachtet, man will zugleich modern und rein t\u00fcrkisch sein, und es ist so weit gekommen, dass man die Sprache durch Abschaffung der alten Schrift, durch Entfernung der arabischen Lehnworte und ihren Ersatz durch ‘t\u00fcrkische’ Neubildungen, teils durch europ\u00e4ische Entlehnungen v\u00f6llig zerst\u00f6rt hat: kein junger Mensch kann mehr die \u00e4ltere Literatur lesen – und es herrscht eine geistige Richtungslosigkeit<\/b>, die \u00e4u\u00dferst gef\u00e4hrlich ist.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The German newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung reproduces a 1938 letter Erich Auerbach sent to Johannes Oeschger from his Turkish exile. The occasion is no doubt the Frankfurt Book Fair where, as I mentioned a few...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}