This book chronicles the story of a group of individuals caught at a crossroads and targeted in the cross fires of history. In 1933 events in their native Germanic lands presented them with a "Hobson's choice"-leave if you can or die Their lives were saved because Turkey was discarding the society and culture inherited from the Ottomans' derelict and shattered empire while recognizing and addressing the need to modernize its society, culture, way of living, and system of higher education. Using a collection of third-party archival documents, cotemporaneous family and collegial...

This book is about a nation's journey of cultural transformation, a process undertaken by the Republic of Turkey soon after gaining its independence in 1923. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's acknowledged father and first president, envisioned this process. It is still ongoing. There is no certainty as to its conclusion, but to date, the progress has been monumental and mostly irreversible. Ataturk's objective was the modernization and westernization of Turkey's culture as it pertained to the country's nation-building agenda. Provided are little known insights. They deal with the visual arts...