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When author Defne Suman<\/a> told me about \"Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu\u2019s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin\u2019s Berlin<\/a>” (“Haf\u0131za Kaz\u0131s\u0131: Bilge Karasu’nun \u0130stanbul’u Walter Benjamin’in Berlin’i<\/a>\") I got very excited about this book that brings Istanbul and Berlin together through two important authors of the 20th century.<\/p>\n What I learned at the Political Sciences Faculty on Frankfurt School and Walter Benjamin popped out and tried to come together with the fragments of my master thesis on Bilge Karasu's \"Night\" that I wrote with the supervision of literary theorist and critic Jale Parla.<\/p>\n The author of the book, \u00dclker G\u00f6kberk is Professor Emerita of German and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. It got me more excited to learn about her acquintance with Karasu.<\/p>\n I decided not to wait until the Turkish and German translations of this book to come out to make an interview. And we met with Mrs. G\u00f6kberk at a video call.<\/p>\n With the hope that this book would contribute to the recognition of Bilge Karasu in the world and would open a new dimention to Karasu studies, I am sharing our interview translated to English by Zeynep Beler.<\/p>\n S: What is the framework in which you united Bilge Karasu and Walter Benjamin, who aside from being prominent writers of the 20th century, come from two completely different historical and cultural contexts?<\/p>\n \u00dc: Walter Benjamin was born at the turn of the 19th century in Charlottenburg and lived in Berlin until the Nazis came to power in 1933, after which he never returned to Germany. He continued to write while in exile in Italy and France. He wrote the Arcades Project at the Bibliothequ\u00e9 Nationale in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France in 1940. He attempted, too late, to escape France through Marseilles and the Pyrenees to Spain and from there to the USA.<\/p>\n Walter Benjamin\u2019s library card, Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale de France, 1940.<\/p><\/div>\n Other writers of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Hannah Arendt, had by that time arrived in New York. Benjamin, however, unable to cross the France-Spain border, tragically took his own life that very night in the 1940. One of my points of departure is what is referred to as \u201cdisplacement\u201d, that is, the aesthetics of being exiled from one\u2019s homeland.<\/p>\n Bilge Karasu, on the other hand, is a writer who spent his entire life in Turkey. He was born in Istanbul in 1930. He never left Turkey and passed away in 1995. Bilge Karasu may never have left hometown, but his work contains the aesthetics of otherness all the same.<\/p>\n Scholarly research thus far has designated Bilge Karasu as an idiosyncratic, modernist, partly postmodernist, writer with excellent mastery of the Turkish language. On the other hand, he has a rather enigmatic character and airtight, hermetic literary style. There are allusions to a political context, emphasis on \u201cotherness\u201d and at the same time, the leitmotif of homosexuality; in Bilge Karasu\u2019s work this is alterity.<\/p>\n Bilge Karasu\u2019s portrait by Levent Kazak \u00a9 Metis Kitap.<\/p><\/div>\n One of the main reasons that spurred me on this study was my interest in the places and spaces of the past. We can presently regard both the Berlin of Benjamin\u2019s childhood and youth and the Beyo\u011flu district of Istanbul where Bilge Karasu spent his childhood and adolescence as lost spaces.<\/p>\n Both writers lived through roughly some type of historical destruction and transformation. Of course, in the case of Benjamin\u2019s Berlin, that destruction is a more tangible historical fact. Benjamin is the child of a German Jewish family assimilated during and in the wake of the 1st World War.<\/p>\n In Benjamin\u2019s non-referential \"Berlin Childhood Around 1900\", those spaces and that period of time is brought back through a certain recollection technique. We are shown the high bourgeois homes and neighborhood.<\/p>\n Likewise, in Bilge Karasu\u2019s \"La\u011f\u0131mlaranas\u0131 ya da Beyo\u011flu\", we are presented with a posthumous compilation of his texts by F\u00fcsun Akatl\u0131. Here he says, \u201cin writing the Beyo\u011flu book, I wanted to relay a subjective history of my mother\u2019s family\u201d and, similar to Benjamin\u2019s, these texts are also on-representational. There are representational references, but in bits and pieces. Fragmented. There are fragments and certain depictions that come repeatedly. Setting out from that, I ventured to examine lost spaces, alterity or displacement, and a model of recollection once again non-representational but rather crystallized within a space.<\/p>\n In Benjamin\u2019s model of recollection, spaces are frozen tableaux. The zoo or his playroom, his grandmother\u2019s home interiors, a panorama of Berlin, the squares\u2026 We again find the same fragmented tableaux in Karasu, challenging also the traditions of autobiography. As you know, Karasu is really playful with the identity of his narrator figures.<\/p>\n Through that relationship, I wanted to bring to light the ethnic and cultural identity of Karasu that I believe has previously been touched upon extremely rarely, if at all.<\/p>\n Karasu\u2019s father was an Istanbul Jew, his mother an Istanbul Rum. He lived with his mother and they moved together to Ankara. I regarded this to be an instance of displacement too. The removal of an ethnically Turkish Beyo\u011flu family to the steppes of Ankara is also an instance of displacement. Karasu\u2019s mother is a Rum and she continued living with Karasu until her advanced years. I myself met her, Madam Aspasia that is.<\/p>\n This alterity, their ethnocultural identities, doesn\u2019t reflect directly on the work of either Benjamin or Karasu. When we think of a literature of Beyo\u011flu, for instance, we think of Giovanni Scognamillo\u2019s \"Bir Levantenin Beyo\u011flu An\u0131lar\u0131\", or Maria Yordanidu\u2019s \"Loksandra\" in the 60s, or Mario Levi\u2026 no matter what distance they take, they construct their own identities within that ethnic identity.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t see that in Karasu, rather, replace a shift with an allusion towards homosexuality. Only when one looks closely at \"La\u011f\u0131mlaranas\u0131 ya da Beyo\u011flu\" does it become apparent that imply ethno-cultural alterity: the lighting of candles, Judeo-Spanish idioms\u2026<\/p>\n S: You\u2019ve summed it up so well. We\u2019ve gone over the lives of both Benjamin and Karasu. Reading your book, I was able to see more clearly how the engineering of the Turkish identity, in the context of the engineering of the nation state, had an affect on Karasu\u2019s life and oeuvre. You go on to explain that we\u2019re able to discern it in the silence and the unspoken.<\/p>\n In my master\u2019s thesis examining Karasu\u2019s \"Night\", my main focus was also on how silence had permeated the text and how within the text, words could relay silence. I set out to investigate the limitations of literature.<\/p>\n Now to approach his life story in the way you\u2019ve interpreted it also contributes a layer of meaning to my thesis.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve said that you approached both the lives of Benjamin and Karasu with emphasis on the transformations of Beyo\u011flu and Berlin and their being forced to leave those cities.<\/p>\n Both volumes in which the authors focused on their respective cities, \"La\u011f\u0131mlararas\u0131 ya da Beyo\u011flu\" and \"Berlin Childhood Around 1900\", were published posthumously. This is also a fascinating connection.<\/p>\n Could you go into a bit more detail on the commonalities you\u2019ve noticed in the two writers\u2019 narratives and remembrances concerning these cities?<\/p>\n \u00dclker G\u00f6kberk gives lectures on Turkish literature at Literary Arts Institution in Portland.<\/p><\/div>\n \u00dc: Of course. That\u2019s a very valid question because the common ground of these remembrances, or unorthodox autobiographies so to speak, is in these two cities.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with Benjamin, whose model of recollection and the way it relates to place is tantamount.<\/p>\n Benjamin repeatedly emphasizes in Berlin Childhood Around 1900 that it\u2019s not only one individual\u2019s childhood that will be told here but the collective childhood experienced in the entire city during that era. I suspect this is where his gravitation towards the city\u2019s spaces in favor to his own personal history comes from.<\/p>\n He crystallizes the past in the city, in place. He criticizes the bourgeois lifestyle. We find its parallel in Karasu, in the form of criticism of Beyo\u011flu. The places where he spent his childhood are no longer the same places, the mass migration from Anatolia in the 1950\u2019s and 1960\u2019s, the destruction of Beyo\u011flu\u2026<\/p>\n Benjamin starts his memoirs, \u201cIt began to be clear to me on the Italian island of Ibiza that I could not return to the Berlin of my birth. Writing is the best inoculation against nostalgia.\u201d He avows to write and to remember in the face of nostalgia.<\/p>\n Diyalektik materyalist arka plan\u0131ndan kalkarak bu burjuva toplumunun uyanmas\u0131 gerekti\u011fini s\u00f6yl\u00fcyor. Benjamin\u2019in betimledi\u011fi burjuva mek\u00e2nlar\u0131 \u00e7ok karanl\u0131k. Objeler, masif ah\u015faptan e\u015fyalar y\u0131\u011f\u0131lm\u0131\u015f h\u00e2lde. Bunlar o kadar a\u011f\u0131r mobilyalar ki diyor, burjuvalar \u00f6ld\u00fckten sonra daha ka\u00e7 nesil g\u00f6t\u00fcrebilecek kadar sa\u011flam ama bunun fark\u0131nda de\u011filler diyor. Kendileri de bir hastanede \u00f6lecekler ve bu mekanlarda \u00f6l\u00fcm yok gibi davran\u0131l\u0131yor.<\/p>\n In parallel, the Beyo\u011flu depicted by Karasu is also deeply dark and gloomy. In some of the texts in \"La\u011f\u0131mlaranas\u0131 Ya Da Beyo\u011flu\", a character called Ispartal\u0131 emerges and here I\u2019d like to allude to your own postmodern study. The montage technique in Benjamin pulls together the fragments into a mosaic. Karasu, in turn, imports parts from his other work. I deciphered the code of Ispartal\u0131 to mean the old bourgeois of Beyo\u011flu, in fact the old residents of Pera, the Levantines so to speak. They were money savers who conducted their lives with the typical bourgeois values.<\/span><\/p>\n Both writers have an ambivalence in the sense of depicting space with elements of light and dark at the same time. There is never a nostalgic desire to return to a time or a place. Yet they don\u2019t push it away completely but rather crystallize it within the places.<\/p>\n S: Your book closes with a biography of Karasu and his burial in a Muslim cemetery. Let\u2019s end our conversation on that note: I hope that the matter of identity and alterity that you\u2019ve drawn attention to through the concepts of Karasu and Benjamin helps pave the way for new studies. Thank you for this valuable interview.<\/p>\n \u00dc: Thank you.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yazar Defne Suman bana “Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu\u2019s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin\u2019s Berlin” (“Haf\u0131za Kaz\u0131s\u0131: Bilge Karasu’nun \u0130stanbul’u Walter Benjamin’in Berlin’i“) kitab\u0131ndan bahsetti\u011finde, \u0130stanbul ve Berlin’i 20. y\u00fczy\u0131l\u0131n bu iki \u00f6nemli yazar\u0131 \u00fczerinden bir araya getiren bu kitap beni \u00e7ok heyecanland\u0131rd\u0131. Siyasal Bilgiler Fak\u00fcltesi’nde okurken Frankfurt Okulu ve Walter Benjamin \u00fczerine \u00f6\u011frendiklerim ve edebiyat teorisyen ve ele\u015ftirmeni Jale Parla dan\u0131\u015fmanl\u0131\u011f\u0131nda Bilge Karasu’nun “Gece”si \u00fczerine yazd\u0131\u011f\u0131m y\u00fcksek lisans tezim zihnimde canland\u0131. Kitab\u0131n yazar\u0131, Portland, Oregon’daki Reed College’\u0131n Alman Dili ve Edebiyat\u0131 B\u00f6l\u00fcm\u00fc’nden emekli \u00f6\u011fretim \u00fcyesi \u00dclker G\u00f6kberk’in Karasu ile ki\u015fisel tan\u0131\u015f\u0131kl\u0131\u011f\u0131n\u0131 okumak heyecan\u0131ma heyecan katt\u0131. istanbulberlin i\u00e7in kitap \u00fczerine bir s\u00f6yle\u015fi […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[603,619,612,606,608,611,618,620,607,613,610,609,617,616,614,615,605,604,118],"class_list":["post-2284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-soylesi","tag-bilge-karasu","tag-bin-dokuz-yuzlerin-basinda-berlinde-cocukluk","tag-bir-lavantenin-beyoglu-anilari","tag-frankfurt-okulu","tag-fusun-akatli","tag-giovanni-scognamillo","tag-hanna-arendt","tag-jale-parla","tag-lagimlaranasi-ya-da-beyoglu","tag-loksandra","tag-maria-yordanidu","tag-mario-levi","tag-max-horkheimer","tag-theodor-adorno","tag-tomris-uyar","tag-turgut-uyar","tag-ulker-gokberk","tag-walter-benjamin","tag-zeynep-beler"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.istanbulberlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/22.jpg\")
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Tthe aesthetics of Alterity<\/h6>\n
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Lost Spaces<\/h6>\n
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Charlottenburg, where he spent his childhood and adolescence, is at the time a district populated by the assimilated Jewish bourgeois of Berlin. Naturally, when the National Socialists took over, democracy was among the first things to go. The Jewish families there, along with their assimilated culture, were gradually annihilated.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.istanbulberlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/lagimlar.jpg\")
Here, then, we can\u2019t really tell if we\u2019re meant to read it as fiction or as memoir. There are references to writers of the era such as Turgut Uyar and Tomris Uyar. Yet when we compare Bilge Karasu\u2019s work to other examples of autobiography it\u2019s not quite an autobiography itself and this is only in relation to Beyo\u011flu.<\/p>\nEthnocultural Identities<\/h6>\n
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Against Nostalgia<\/h6>\n