Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination. By Stefan Ihrig. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 311. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-0674368378.

Abstract

Central European History vol. 39, no. 1. BOOK REVIEWS book is often chaotic, lacks clear development, is repetitious, and makes irrelevant jumps through time—all of which, in the end, needlessly blur his narrative. L EO VAN B ERGEN R OYAL N ETHERLANDS I NSTITUTE OF S OUTHEAST A SIAN AND C ARIBBEAN S TUDIES doi:10.1017/S0008938916000224 Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination. By Stefan Ihrig. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 311. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-0674368378. It is rare to read a work of history that is both startling and true, but Ataturk 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 Ataturk 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” (Vorkampfer) for Germany. Ihrig’s readings of the “media frenzy” (151) over Turkey’s War of Independence are es- pecially 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 com- mentary 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 Fuhrer 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). Ataturk 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, Ataturk, as Hitler would later proclaim and his press endlessly repeat, was the German leader’s “star in the dark- ness” 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: crush- ing 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