İsmail Habib Sevük’s Together with Atatürk (Atatürk’le Beraber) (3)

The blind spot in “X-ray Vision”: Hitler

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3

A report on the meeting between Hitler and Mahmut Bey (Soydan), MP for Siirt, during the latter’s visit to Berlin in 1933 (Milliyet, 16 July 1933).

At the end of the previous instalment, I said that I would return to a passage in İsmail Habib Sevük’s essay entitled “X-ray Vision” which genuinely surprised me when I first read it. After describing the worldwide response to Atatürk’s death, Sevük turns his attention to Adolf Hitler:

The world seemed to be speaking with one voice: “He is not yours alone; he is ours as well.” The memory of that momentous death enveloped the world like the air surrounding the planet.

Of all the words spoken around the world during those days of mourning, it was Hitler’s admission that struck me most. Five years earlier, when the German head of state received our late Siirt deputy Mahmut in Berlin, he had said: “When I embarked upon my work, and placed my faith in its success, I always took your leader as my model.” The late chief columnist of Milliyet reported this valuable testimony in his newspaper at the time, with that gentle pen of his and without any fanfare; yet not only foreigners but even many among us remained unaware of it.

Hitler was still new then. He could make such a statement, knowing that it would appear in only one Turkish newspaper. But Hitler now? Hitler, before whom the victors of the world now presented themselves, and whose voice rang out more powerfully than any other across the globe… Yet this time, too, he spoke with candour -and not merely to one Turkish newspaper but to the entire world. Recalling what he had told Deputy Mahmut five years earlier, he once again acknowledged and proclaimed:

“I took Atatürk as my model.” For Atatürk was the first to rise up against the victors of the world, the first to crush injustice and make right prevail.

To have discerned, even then, the dwarf concealed within the seemingly gigantic victors of the world -that is what we call “X-ray vision”. And now Hitler, alongside us, says the same once again. (pp. 6-7)

Akşam, 28 Nisan 1939

Hitler’s admiration for Atatürk, and the extent to which he took Turkey’s experience -from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire through the National Struggle and into the Atatürk era- as a model, have been widely debated in Turkey, particularly since the publication of Stefan Ihrig’s Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination in 2014. For now, however, I shall not enter into that debate. I have not yet read Ihrig’s book. Moreover, to reach a judgement on so serious a subject, it would not be enough simply to read the book: one would also need to examine carefully the claims it advances and the responses made to them.

Here, I shall confine myself to the passage from Sevük quoted above.

“X-ray Vision” was published in Cumhuriyet on 24 December 1938. The Second World War had not yet begun. By then, however, the character of Hitler and the regime he had established was no longer a secret, even to those who did not follow politics closely. The Nazi dictatorship had eliminated political opposition, abolished the trade unions, enacted the Nuremberg Laws depriving Jews of their rights as citizens, rapidly rearmed Germany and remilitarised the Rhineland. Austria had been annexed in March 1938; in September, with the approval of Britain and France at Munich, Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland had been ceded to Germany. Only a few weeks before Sevük’s article appeared, the Kristallnacht pogrom had taken place: Jewish homes and businesses had been looted, synagogues set ablaze and tens of thousands of Jews deported to concentration camps.

In Sevük’s eyes, however, Hitler is not first and foremost the dictator responsible for all this, but a great statesman before whom “the victors of the world now presented themselves” and whose voice rings out more powerfully than any other across the globe. Hitler’s declaration that he had taken Atatürk as his model clearly pleases Sevük and even fills him with pride. Sevük laments the fact that such “valuable” testimony was not more widely known, either in Turkey or in the rest of the world.

This satisfaction is also connected to a broader sentiment that surfaces from time to time throughout the book. Sevük repeatedly emphasises the approval, esteem and admiration that Atatürk received from foreign statesmen, journalists and intellectuals. In his eyes, such attention is not merely a personal tribute to a single leader. In the figure of Atatürk, Turkey itself is gaining acceptance and respect in the world; in a sense, it is once again being “treated as a country that matters”.

The message Sevük wishes to convey to his reader may be summarised as follows: Look, Atatürk is not merely a leader whom we admire; the whole world acknowledges his greatness. He is restoring our country’s lost prestige. Turkey, in turn, can share in that prestige only insofar as it rallies behind him and does not stray from the path he has shown.

Atatürk’s personal prestige is thus directly identified with that of the country. Loyalty to Atatürk is transformed from allegiance to a particular leader or political programme into the very condition for the country to command respect in the world. In this conception, it is Atatürk who wins international esteem; the part assigned to the people is to stand behind him and share in the prestige he has secured.

It is precisely here that the special significance Sevük attaches to praise from Hitler lies. The more powerful and influential in the world the person offering the praise, the greater the prestige Atatürk -and, through him, Turkey- appears to acquire. Sevük therefore does not question the nature of the regime represented by the man offering that praise. Rather than casting doubt on Hitler’s words, his power makes them all the more valuable in Sevük’s eyes.

The expression “the victors of the world” is particularly significant here. By it, Sevük means the victors of the First World War and the post-war order they established. In his view, Atatürk had been the first to realise that these victors were not as powerful as they appeared, to rise up against them and ultimately to make right prevail. Hitler, in turn, was now forcing those same victors into retreat and thereby confirming the truth that Atatürk had discerned years earlier.

Sevük thus places Hitler’s moves -from the Rhineland through Austria to the Sudetenland- on the same historical trajectory as Atatürk’s struggle against the imperialist victors. He fails to see the vast social and political gulf between the two; he draws a parallel between a war of national liberation and Nazi Germany’s expansionism simply because both challenged the victors of the First World War. Hitler’s admiration for Atatürk is, in his eyes, powerful confirmation from outside of this supposed similarity.

We cannot, of course, infer from this passage that Sevük was aware of all Hitler’s policies and practices and individually approved of each one. Yet the fact that he could speak of Hitler with such admiration only a few weeks after Kristallnacht shows that the barbarity of the Nazi regime evidently carried no weight in his political judgement. Hitler’s praise is turned directly into yet another proof of Atatürk’s greatness, without any consideration of who it came from or what kind of regime that person represented.

Further research would be needed to determine how widespread Sevük’s perspective was among pro-regime intellectuals in Turkey in late 1938. For now, I do not wish to make any categorical generalisation. Nevertheless, the fact that these lines could appear in Cumhuriyet, one of the regime’s staunchest and most influential newspapers, suggests that this outlook was not peculiar to Sevük alone.

It is here that the article’s most striking irony emerges. Sevük calls Atatürk’s ability to discern in advance “the dwarf within the seemingly gigantic victors of the world” a form of “X-ray vision”. Yet when he himself looks at Hitler -who was driving Europe and the whole world towards catastrophe- he fails to see beyond the outward appearance of power and success.

Thus “X-ray Vision” unwittingly records a major blind spot in Sevük’s own vision -and at precisely the moment when the whole world had reached the brink of a terrifying abyss.

To be continued