Modernity, Nationalism, and Civilizing the Arts

Abstract

Unsettling narratives on the purported alterity of Turkey and Germany, Chapter 1 discusses parallels and differences in German (1871) and Turkish nation-building (1923) and the role of art in claiming modern nationhood. It examines tropes of Turkey’s “belated modernity” and Germany’s Sonderweg as two discourses of exceptionalism that have significantly shaped the art world and asks what these tropes reveal and obscure. The young Turkish republic witnessed an enthusiastic embrace of artistic modernism, as Ottoman art was deemed unfit for the modern nation-state. In contrast, Germany officially decried modernism as decidedly “un-German.” It was only in the 1950s that the Federal Republic adopted explicitly occidental cultural policies to overcome longstanding anti-western and anti-modernist currents as part of its post-WWII rehabilitation. How can one explain the persisting asymmetry in the perception of Turkish and German art, given that Turkey’s attempt to align itself with Western modernity by rationalizing artistic expression in the 1920s predates West-Germany’s shift to occidental cultural policies that were only established after 1945? The controversies surrounding “national art” and continued anxieties regarding modern belonging discussed in this chapter show how ideas of modernity and civility remain indebted to processes of violence that art must always disavow.