HAYMATLOS! exile: Turkey, Traugott Fuchs’ landscape of reconciliation

Abstract

This study aims to capture the émigré experience of German emigrants to Turkey in the Years 1933- 1945. By introducing the conceptual framework of haymatlos, the author tries to explain the émigré experience as a historical feeling rather than a sine qua non of world politics or the evils produced by Nazi Germany. Traugott Fuchs, who emigrated to Turkey as a young man in 1934, is not one of the grand names of the emigration to Turkey. It will be his life, however, that will bear example of the émigré experience in the global, local, personal and intellectual context. It will be, also, through his life that the conceptual framework of haymatlos will move from an attemptative definition to a more solidified definition that is deeply grounded, but still rootless, in the ‘mist of exile’. Diaspora and exile will then become the antidote to the horrors produced by Nazi Germany.