The Kemalist project of modern Turkish nation-building came under increasing scrutiny with the end of the Cold War. Since the 1990s, a number of issues, such as Turkey's inability to find a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish question, the continuing vestige of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) involvement in civilian politics, and the tension between the Sunni Muslim masses and the secular elites, were all tied to the flaws and shortcomings—or alternatively, misinterpretation and abandonment—of the country's founding ideology. As a result, there has been a sustained scholarly effort both in Turkey and abroad to ideologically categorize and historically contextualize Kemalism. Stefan Ihrig's timely contribution brings to the fore a connection between Nazism and Kemalism that has been hitherto little understood. The prevailing understanding had been that Kemalism, which was (and still is) an ideology with ambiguous contours, had been strongly influenced by the rise of Fascism and Nazism during the 1930s and early 1940s. Ihrig, however, decisively makes the case for a much more interactive process that spans from 1919 to 1945. What is more, Ihrig's findings clearly suggest that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Kemalism had been much more influential on Nazism than the other way around. This conclusion is very important for the study of both ideologies.In the prologue (“Leaving ‘Enverland’”), Ihrig sets the stage with the Ottoman involvement in World War I and its alliance with Germany. This wartime alliance would be consequential for the German nationalist infatuation with Mustafa Kemal, the Ankara government, and the “New Turkey” from 1919 onward. This sets the stage for the the main actors who would later play a significant role in Ihrig's narrative: “the Ottoman Germans,” that is, the Germans who had served in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. As Ihrig points out, a “Disproportionately high number of soldiers and diplomats who served in the Ottoman front later took on important tasks in the Third Reich” (5).Since the late nineteenth century, there had been a deepening relationship between Wilhelmine German and the Hamidian Ottoman Empire. This connection grew in significance after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. Ihrig deals with this background very briefly, leaving it to his follow-up work, Justifying Genocide.1 Instead, chapter 1 (“The Lessons for Germany: The Turkish War of Independence as a Major Weimar Media Event”) concentrates on the main reasons of German nationalist fervor around the Turkish struggle of independence. With reference to an array of nationalist newspapers of the period, Ihrig clearly shows how the nationalist German press had framed the Turkish struggle as “anti-Entente” rather than “anti-imperialist” (33) and had suggested that there was much to learn from it (31).For the German audience, the Turkish story involved an emotional satisfaction of “schadenfreude about the Anatolian troubles of the Entente” (37) and a political point of reference for the post-Versailles Germany. Indeed, the German nationalist press was quick and enthusiastic in pointing out the Turkish success against desperate odds as a way out of the shame and humiliation of Versailles. They went so far as to suggest that “the Turkish case signaled a new model of politics, if not the advent of a new age, … for nationalists in general” (49). The defeat of Entente powers in Anatolia at the hands of the Kemalist forces was greeted ecstatically by the German nationalist press, who took this to be the vindication of their ideas against the acceptance of the Versailles Treaty. The politics of Weimar leaders was frequently compared to the collaborationist government of the sultan in Istanbul. The Ankara government under Mustafa Kemal had chosen to resist, and thereby succeeded in destroying a Paris Treaty, the Sevres. If the Sevres could be reversed, then so too could Versailles (53).Ihrig claims (chapter 2: “‘Ankara in Munich’: Hitler Putsch and Turkey”) that the Hitler Putsch was inspired much more by Mustafa Kemal and his Ankara government than by Mussolini's “March on Rome” (68). After the Treaty of Lausanne consolidating the Turkish victory was signed in July 1923, a series of articles written by the German mercenary Hans Tröbst were published in the extreme nationalist Heimatland. Ihrig adds that Tröbst was encouraged to write these articles by General Ludendorff (82). While in Munich, Hitler had invited Tröbst to talk to SA leaders about his impressions of Turkey. The invitation stated: “What you have witnessed in Turkey is what we will have to do in the future as well in order to liberate ourselves” (87).By October 1923, the Bavaria-Reich dispute had culminated in the establishment of the Triumvirate under Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. On October 27 Heimatland published a front page article titled: “Give us an Ankara Government!” to encourage the establishment of a nationalist government and army starting in Munich—much like the Turkish nationalist government and army had started in Ankara (88). Two days later, on October 29, the Turkish Grand National Assembly declared Turkey a republic and Mustafa Kemal its first president. Ten days later, on November 8, Hitler attempted the Beer Hall Putsch. While relating this sequence of events, Ihrig does not mention the declaration of republic in Turkey, which must have been discussed in the German press at that time. Nevertheless, Ihrig points out that during his trial, Hitler refers to Mustafa Kemal being a traitor against the Sultan in order to save his nation, as well as to Mussolini's March on Rome (97–98). For Ihrig, “the mentioning of Kemal Pasha before Mussolini is not simply a narrative mishap; there was a hierarchy to Hitler's reasoning” (98). Furthermore, Ihrig emphasizes not only the Nazi but also the Italian Fascist admiration for the Kemalists: “In the time before the March on Rome, Mussolini apparently liked to call himself ‘the Mustafa Kemal of a Milanese Ankara’” (106). It must be noted that this was largely a one-sided interest: in Ankara, there seems to be little discussion about the events in Italy or Germany at the time. The Kemalist movement precluded both Italian Fascist and German Nazi movements, and achieved its aims before these two came to power.Ihrig stresses that for the Nazis, who had to “go legal” after the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch, it had become difficult to propose a “Turkish solution” to Germany's problems, so their focus shifted to Italy where Mussolini had come to power within the bounds of legality (chapter 3: “Hitler's ‘Star in the Darkness,’” 110). Still, the Nazi interest in the New Turkey under Atatürk's leadership continued unabated: “Throughout the Weimar years the nationalist media continued to report extensively about Turkey, highlighting, among other things, the massive efforts of reconstruction, reform and rearmament as well as the völkisch character of the new state” (113).The Turkish lessons were back on the front pages with the Machtergreifung in February 1933, now that Germany had a government and a leader who could implement them: “In July 1933 Hitler was interviewed by Milliyet. In this interview, ‘he called Atatürk the greatest man of the century.’ He referred to him as a shining star in dark times” (114). In another occasion in 1938, while receiving a Turkish delegation on his birthday, Hitler went even further: “Atatürk was the first to show that it is possible to mobilize and regenerate the resources that a country has lost. In this respect Atatürk was a teacher; Mussolini was his first and I his second student” (116).In the eyes of the Nazis, Kemalism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism belonged to a similar understanding of what modernity, politics, nation-building, and leadership were about. Throughout his third, fourth, and fifth chapters Ihrig takes up these common threads as they had been emphasized by the Third Reich media: the “völkish” hypermodernity of the state, the Führer Principle, ethnic cleansing of the country, secularism that radically does away with everything that is political in religion and puts it firmly under state control. What was more surprising was the way that “racial status” of Turks was viewed by the Nazis: “In the aftermath of the Nuremberg Laws, the NSDAP Office for Racial Policy announced their decision to regard Turks as part of the Aryan races” (128).Not only did the Nazis regard the Turks as racially equal, but also the New Turkey and its leader, Atatürk, as “one of them”: alongside Fascist Italy, Japan, and Spain, diplomats from Turkey were accorded highest protocol (126). Turkish events of national significance (like the tenth anniversary of the Republic in 1933) received highest possible attention from the Nazi leadership. “Atatürk featured prominently in books on contemporary Führers and the new world order. Here, time and again, Atatürk was put on an equal footing with Hitler himself as well as Mussolini” (134). The reasons for this overtly positive image of Turks, the New Turkey, and Atatürk lay in the distorted perception of the Nazis: While Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s was hardly a democracy, it was also not a country governed through the “Führer Principle.” In fact, twice—in 1924 and in 1929—Atatürk had experimented with a transition to a multiparty system. When offered an administrative reform along Fascist Italian lines by the party secretary Recep Peker in 1936, he summarily refused it and proceeded to liquidate both Peker and his old-time friend and ally, İsmet İnönü, and replaced them with more liberal-minded figures.Ihrig points out in chapter 4 (“The ‘Turkish Führer’”) that Atatürk and the New Turkey were regarded “as a case study in ‘Führer politics’” (147–48). Atatürk was used to educate the German masses on the doctrine of heroic leadership and as proof that great men, and not the masses, made history (149). As such, German biographies of Atatürk “were truly epic stories centered on a strong Führer figure” (152–53). Thus, “The ‘other Atatürk,’ the heavy drinker and womanizer, was not present in these texts” (158). Ihrig suggests that selective as the Nazi vision of Atatürk had been, the main reason for the constant repetition of his story was its “happy ending”: the Nazis in general, and Hitler in particular, saw Atatürk and New Turkey as a victory of the völkisch modernity and celebrated them as such (158–59). The stories of Atatürk and New Turkey were supposed to be a Fürstenspiegel for the German nation (168).The selectivity of the Nazi outlook was not limited to the person of Atatürk either. As Ihrig discusses in chapter 5 (“The New Turkey: Nazi Visions of a Modern Völkisch State”), New Turkey herself was seen as a role model by the Nazis in many key respects. At this point, it is commendable of Ihrig to carefully distinguish between the Nazi vision and the historical evidence from the outset: If the Third Reich authors were to write a comparative history of fascism, they would have included Turkey as “one of them.” … However, this does not mean that Kemalism was in fact fascist. It only illustrates, on the one hand, how selective and predetermined the Nazi vision of Turkey was and, on the other, how ambiguous the Kemalist project still was, that it could “accommodate” such perceptions. (169) The Nazi press defined Kemalism as a “national-revolutionary ideology” that was “republican, nationalist, völkisch, laicist” (172). They praised the ethnic cleansing of Anatolia as a result of the Armenian Genocide during World War I and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s, and drew chilling parallels between the fate of Ottoman Armenians and what they planned to do to German Jews (175–78). Ihrig takes up the connection between the Holocaust and Armenian genocide in much greater detail in Justifying Genocide, where he states: “The search for the origins of the ‘final solution’ … cannot be solved by pointing fingers at other, previous genocides.”2 In this book, however, Ihrig lays the groundwork for his future argument by stating that, from the 1920s onward, Hitler “was to use the Armenians frequently in his speeches as an example of a ‘lesser race’” (180) and repeatedly referred to Armenians and Greeks as the kind of unworthy, slave-like people “like the Jews” (180–81). Thus, Ihrig claims, in the Nazi vision, “this double [Armenian and Greek] ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Anatolia was the precondition for the success of New Turkey” (184, italics in the original).The Nazis also lauded Kemalism for its radical notion of secularism. Ihrig argues that there was a deliberate attempt to draw parallels with Germany. To that end, the Nazi press used Christian terms to identify Islamic institutions in the Ottoman Empire—the Islamic “Church,” “priesthood,” “papal powers of caliph,” and so on (184–85).Ihrig points out that, not surprisingly, not all aspects of Turkish reforms were appealing to the Nazis: “There was a host of Turkish nontopics. The language reforms and the new role of women were two prominent nontopics in the Nazi discourse on the New Turkey” (188). Still other aspects of the New Turkey were either disregarded or distorted by the Nazis, such as its strategic partnership with the Soviet Union from the early 1920s or its assumption of central planning that was clearly inspired by the Soviets in the 1930s (194).The selective and distorted Nazi view of New Turkey extended to its foreign policy, where, because the Turkish Republic was the result of the destruction of a Paris peace treaty, Turkey was regarded as “the revisionist state in interwar Europe, par excellence” (195, italics in the original). After 1933 Turkish interwar revisionism in foreign policy, like the remilitarization of the Straits and the annexation of Hatay/Sanjak, was glorified by the German press in a bid to establish parallels with German revisionism in the Rhein and Südet questions (195–96).Ihrig comes up with a useful term to describe the Nazi German press and politicians' selective analysis of Turkey: “Wherever possible the Nazi media and politicians tried to show just how similar both the New Turkey and New Germany were: the New Turkey and the New Germany were twinned” (202). This notion of “twinning” comes to an end with the outbreak of World War II, which for Germany and Turkey (as well as for Ihrig) makes things more complicated. In chapter 6 (“The Second World War and Turkey—Another Spain?”), Ihrig tries to situate German-Turkish relations in parallel to Italian-Spanish relations and argues that Turkey acted by and large as an “Axis neutral” (218). This chapter proves to be the most problematic for Ihrig, because the gap between the Nazi vision and the Turkish reality grows too deep, and Ihrig—for understandable reasons—does not go into a discussion of Turkish wartime policies by relying on the relevant historical scholarship. Still, by looking at the rather narrow and distorted evidence in the German press, Ihrig claims that the revival of Turanism in Turkey, after the German attack on the Soviet Union, showed that the Turkish military and civilian leadership were “tempted by the Turanist possibilities that had opened up with Germany's attack on the Soviet Union” (217). Ihrig also notes that the Turkish government's attitude toward both Jewish refugees and its own Jewish citizens was mixed: on the one hand, the government initiated anti-Semitic measures and allowed anti-Semitic discourse to flourish in the press; on the other hand, it “saved a number of Jews in Europe from Germany” (219)—and, one must have added, from Vichy France and occupied Greece.While his arguments on Turkey's position in the war remain shaky, Ihrig nevertheless sheds light on the Nazi perception of Turkey after Atatürk's death in 1938 and during World War II. As Ihrig suggests, the two issues are interconnected as the Nazi press frequently blamed Turkey's anti-German policies on the failure of Atatürk's successors to remain true to his legacy: when Turkey finally declared war against Germany in February 1945, the Völkischer Beobachter called it “treason against itself” and claimed to be the only true keeper of “Atatürkism” (219). The German efforts to woo Turkey, with economic and military help and calls of “taking part in the New Order of Europe” (220) however, did not significantly affect Turkish wartime position of armed nonbelligerency. In the end President İnönü was swayed neither by Hitler nor by Churchill, and pursued a very narrowly self-interested policy.Ihrig's book creates groundbreaking paths of research on the different völkisch nation-building projects during the first half of the twentieth century. For Ihrig clearly identifies Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy (and to some extent, Fascist Spain), along with Kemalist Turkey, as a group of völkisch modernities that were in many respects alike, but in many other, crucial respects different. Thus, Ihrig's work blazes a trail for further research on these ideologies that “were engaged in an ongoing dialogue throughout their existence” (227).