History and Historiography: Politics and Memory in the Turkish Republic

Contemporary European History

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 93-105

  Eissenstat, Howard ^a  

^a NONE

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Indexed keywords

EID: 85008566395     PISSN: 09607773     EISSN: 14692171     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S096077730300105X     Document Type: Review

References (8)

1. Properly, Atatürk should only be referred to by this name after 1934, when Turkey required its citizens to take on surnames. He chose-and parliament dutifully conferred-the surname Atatürk, or father of the Turks. Atat ürk was born a simple Mustafa and was given (or appropriated) the honorific Kemal, or perfection, at elementary school.
2. Valuable shorter works include Alexandre Jevakhoff, Kemal Atatürk: Les chemins de l'Orient (Paris: Tallandier, 1989) and A. L. Macfie, Atatürk (London: Longman, 1994).
3. As is the case for most books written on modern Turkey in Western languages, Atatürk was almost immediately translated into Turkish. As an ‘event book’, its publisher, Sabah, chose to offer it as a hardback, a rarity in the world of Turkish publishing.
4. Etienne Balibar, ‘The Nation Form’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (trans. Chris Turner), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 93.
5. ‘Ne mutlu Türküm diyene'
6. Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1993), 156.
7. While probably more true for the republican than for the Ottoman archives, Aktar's complaints regarding the difficulties of researching some politically charged topics are valid. Nevertheless, my own experience has shown that, for the patient and diplomatic researcher, there are tremendous treasures to be found regarding even the most sensitive issues.
8. For an important, if highly polemical, discussion of the human costs for Muslims in this break-up, see Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995).