It is rare to read a work of history that is both startling and true, but Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination is both. Reading through “hundreds, perhaps thousands” (194) of texts published in German newspapers between 1919 and 1945, Stefan Ihrig has discovered the German Right's “obsession” (14, 27) with Turkey, which culminated in a Mustafa Kemal Atatürk cult comparable to that of the Turkish Republic. The atmosphere of the Nazi movement was “saturated with ‘Turkey’” (101), and articles on Turkey outnumbered those on all other countries combined. As Ihrig points out, one finds almost nothing about Turkey in studies of National Socialism. Yet, as early as 1920, Turkey was repeatedly depicted on the Right as a “role model” (Vorkämpfer) for Germany.
Ihrig's readings of the “media frenzy” (151) over Turkey's War of Independence are especially incisive. Given the German elites' traditional philhellenism, some papers had initially favored Greece, but eventually all of them turned against it, as seen in their lopsided commentary on the massacres committed on both sides, and in their admiration for Turkey's defiant behavior at the 1923 Conference of Lausanne. By overturning the 1920 Diktat forced on Turkey in Paris, Team Ankara had won German hearts. What explained Turkey's success? Turkey had a Führer who had, ignoring the Ottoman leadership in Constantinople, established his own government on the periphery (Ankara), stamped an army out of the ground, and, through sheer force of will, reconquered Anatolia from its Greek and Armenian minorities and their French allies: “a revisionist-nationalist dream come true” (11). Turkey was a “‘parallel Germany,’ where things went the way they were supposed to” (64). Atatürk abolished opposition parties, introduced an autarchic economy, and ruled an ethnically cleansed, racially pure population of farmer-warriors. The New Turkey was everything the Weimar Republic was not.
Ihrig revises our picture of National Socialism in a number of ways. He topples Benito Mussolini from his pedestal as a source of Adolf Hitler's inspiration. Until the Italian alliance in the 1930s, il Duce was barely mentioned in the Nazi press. By contrast, Atatürk, as Hitler would later proclaim and his press endlessly repeat, was the German leader's “star in the darkness” during the long years before 1933. In arguing that Turkey mirrored the Nazi utopia, Ihrig casts a skeptical eye on the recent thesis that Nazis thought themselves Christian: crushing the “churches” (i.e., Islamic institutions) was “an integral ingredient, if not one of the preconditions” (225) of Turkey's success.
Ihrig's most exciting chapter is his second, “Ankara in Munich,” on the 1923 Beerhall Putsch. In the run-up to November 9, 1923, Heimatland, the organ of Bavaria's paramilitary organizations, ran a six-part series by Hans Tröbst—who had recently served with the Kemalists—that offered one analogy after another between Germany and Turkey. Hitler was so enthusiastic about the series that he invited Tröbst to address the SA leadership, suggesting that, “What you have witnessed in Turkey is what we will have to do in the future…” (83). Bavaria's Crown Prince Ruprecht was also eager to hear Tröbst, and the National Association of German Officers extended a similar invitation. By late October, Heimatland was demanding, “Give Us an Ankara Government!” (88). Although the conspirators were inspired, Ihrig shows, by an Ankara Solution, some equivocated at their trials—but not Hitler: “Never in world history did a nation rise out of infestation starting from the capital… You can see this in Turkey. Not from the rotten center, from Constantinople, could salvation come” (97).
Ihrig implies a special affinity for Hitler's movement among Germans who had served in Turkey during World War I, mentioning, in particular, two generals who resided in the Bavarian capital in November 1923. He concedes that “we don't know anything of [Liman von Sander's] involvement in völkisch or nationalist circles during these turbulent times. Similarly unclear remains the involvement of Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein…” (101). Raising the question suggests, however, that there was some “involvement.” Yet, Liman's relations with his Turkish counterparts had been terrible, and he had forbidden the deportation of Smyrna's Armenians. He also had a Jewish grandfather. Is it likely that he would have been “involved” in the circles Ihrig suggests? Kress, for his part, had signed an appeal sponsored by the German-Armenian Society against the Lausanne Treaty and, as late as 1943, would confess, referring to the Armenians, that he had found it deeply shameful to work with the Turks.
Do the tropes Ihrig has found reflect only the “Nazi imagination” of his title, or has he discovered something new about public opinion itself—the holy grail for anyone doing research on genocidal societies? He sometimes elides the difference between the views of the center-to-far-right press that is his announced subject, and those of the German public, which he also describes as being in “an ecstatic frenzy about Atatürk” (6), with a “fixation [on Turkey] that bordered on the obsessive” (11, 14). Calls to “learn from Turkey” were “ubiquitous in the German press” (64), he says, for, in the eyes of a desperate and desolate Germany, this was a nationalist dream come true” (12).
Even conceding that many, perhaps even most, Germans cheered Turkey's victory in its War of Independence, Ihrig still might have looked around a bit more than he has. Although he samples the press across the political spectrum, Ihrig draws his material entirely from Berlin—except for the Völkischer Beobachter and Heimatland, whose reach hardly extended beyond Bavaria. Thus Catholic views are represented by Germania, an outlier owned by Franz von Papen. More typical Catholic papers in the West are ignored. The non-Nazi paper he most often cites is the Kreuzzeitung, with a circulation of 6,000 and falling. The readership of the SPD's Münchener Post was ten times that number. Still, almost fifty years after Ulrich Trumpener published Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 (1968), a brilliant but little-read book—probably because its subject was a relationship that seemed irrelevant to Germany and to Europe at the time—we must rejoice that Ihrig is bringing Turkey back in, transforming what we thought we knew, but only because we had never looked.
