Exile in Translation: Exodus of German Culture to Turkey and the United States (1933-1953)

While the American exile of many German academics and artists—Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse—is well known and documented, the intellectual contribution of German émigrés to the educational and cultural institutions of the young Turkish nation remains largely unknown.  The comparative analysis in this review aims to illustrate the conditions for the realization of cultural transfer as well as its limitations in two historical instances.

Azade Seyhan is the Fairbank Professor in the Humanities, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Affiliated Faculty in Philosophy and in Middle East Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (University of California Press, 1992); Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton University Press, 2001); and Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context (MLA, 2008). She has published and lectured extensively on German Idealism and Romanticism, critical theory, exile narratives, Turkish-German literature, and the theory of the novel. Seyhan's most recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Turkish Studies; Colloquia Germanica; Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe; The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism; and German Politics and Society.  In recent years, she has been a keynote speaker at national and international conferences at the University of Bath, England, University of Copenhagen, Georgetown University, University of Pennsylvania, the Max Weber Stiftung, Istanbul, and the Swedish Research Institute, Istanbul. (https://www.brynmawr.edu/people/azade-seyhan)

The event is collaboratively organized by the Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch and German and “litteraturforskning som ledande område”.

During her visit at Stockholm University Azade Seyhan will be holding two more lectures to which we would also like to invite you:

May 23, Bergsmannen, Aula Magna, 10-11 am: “Beyond Exile and Sorrow: The Displaced Author Writes of Passage.” Keynote lecture at the Literary Studies Day.

May 31, E 439, 2-4 pm: “Cultural Memory as Neurosis in Exile Narratives”