IN A LETTER TO HANNS EISLER, sent from exile in Helsinki in March 1941, Bertolt Brecht wrote the following: “I did not hear anything about a new route, maybe we can travel through Turkey, but it's not at all sure.” In the end, Brecht never went to Turkey; his journey to California instead led him through Moscow, Leningrad, and Vladivostok. But Brecht could have traveled through Turkey, and engaged with Turkish intellectuals, academics, and institutions—as Leo Spitzer, Ernst Reuter, and Erich Auerbach did. For in addition to taking in refugees who had been victimized by Nazi persecution—professors, teachers, attorneys, artists deemed unreliable—Turkey was an important transit country for Jewish emigrants. While Brecht's own journey took a different path, his theatrical practices found their way into Turkish literary and political life, starting in the mid-1950s with the international success of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children, 1939) in guest productions in Paris in 1954 and London in 1956. The reception of Brecht in Africa and South America, Asia, and the Middle East has been the topic of past conferences and publications. However, despite continuous and intensive engagement with Brecht by Turkish academics, intellectuals, dramatists, and directors, almost no scholarly attention has been paid to the reception of Brecht in Turkey. This is the case within both Brecht studies and German studies. The history of Turkish theater in the twentieth century is marked by continuous exchange between Germany and Turkey— an exchange that, to be sure, extends beyond Brecht. Muhsin Ertuğrul (1892–1979), for example, considered the leading figure or ‘father’ of modern Turkish theater, regularly went to Berlin as early as 1916 (Lessing Theater and Deutsches Kunstlertheater) to “deepen his technical skills,” returning decades later to Munich and Bochum in 1966 to research “theater education methods.” At the invitation of the Turkish government, the German composer Paul Hindemith came to Turkey to establish the State Conservatory for Music and Drama in Ankara in 1936, while at the same time serving as adviser to the Turkish government on issues pertaining to culture and music.

TURKISH-GERMAN ACTRESS, dramatist, and novelist Emine Sevgi Özdamar has repeatedly cited the following sentence as her first words in German: “Mr. Besson, I have come in order to learn Brechtian theater from you.” Before fulfilling her dream in 1976, she came as guest worker in 1965 and had worked for two years in a factory in West Berlin. In her acceptance speech of the prestigious Kleist Prize in 2004—which she received at Brecht's former theater, the Berliner Ensemble—Özdamar looked back to the mid-1960s as the time she had “got to know Brecht, Lotte Lenya, Ernst Busch, and Kafka,” when “[a] Turkish dramatist, a leftist Brechtian, took [her] to the Berliner Ensemble.” She did not reflect on her first two years in West Germany in terms of her economic experience in the factory, but rather as the time during which she learned German and first encountered German literature via the theater. The Turkish dramatist she mentioned is none other than Vasıf Öngören, who, beyond his crucial role within the development of Turkish political theater discussed in the previous chapters, was equally important in Özdamar's formative years in theater. In 1967 Özdamar returned to Turkey in order to attend drama school, spending three years at the well-known LCC in Istanbul. Beklan Algan, director of the 1964 Szechwan production discussed in the first chapter, as well as prominent director Muhsin Ertuğrul and dramatist Haldun Taner, were among her teachers there. Until her emigration from Turkey in 1976 Özdamar had performed regularly in stage productions by prominent directors, including Sermet Çagan and above all Öngören. The second and third installments of her Istanbul-Berlin trilogy Sonne auf halbem Weg: Die Istanbul-Berlin Trilogie (Sun Halfway: The Istanbul-Berlin Trilogy, 2006), provide an auto-fictional account of Özdamar's engagement with Brechtian theater in both divided Germany and Turkey. The second part, Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn, 1998), recounts her engagement with Brecht when she was back in Turkey, including her time in drama school and her encounter with Turkish Brechtian directors and dramatists, particularly Öngören, first in West Berlin and later in Ankara and Istanbul as a member of his ensemble, the Birlik Sahnesi.

IN 1968 DRAMATURG KÄTHE RÜLICKE-WEILER, a former member of Bertolt Brecht's theater company, the Berliner Ensemble, remarked that “of the fifty-three countries in which Brecht was staged in the ten years following his death, more than half are not in Europe but in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.” Brecht, generally regarded as the most influential playwright of the twentieth century, died in 1956, but his theoretical writings and dramaturgical practices shaped many of the debates—albeit to differing degrees—about the politics of culture in divided Germany throughout the politically tumultuous 1960s. The impact of his work went far beyond a German or even a narrowly defined Cold War context. He was, as this book will demonstrate, a key figure in Turkey, where a period of liberalization following the military coup of 1960 saw the emergence of a new generation of politically engaged intellectuals who sought to link culture to politics, art to life, and theater to revolutionary practice in the service of effecting societal change. I will, moreover, highlight this period's significance for Turkish- German literature, exemplified by authors such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Aras Oren. For decades, I will argue, Bertolt Brecht has connected two literary histories that have as a result become ever more intertwined. Studying how Brecht's thought was first interpreted by theater practitioners in Turkey, and then by Turkish writers living in Germany enhances our understanding of the intellectual interchanges that shaped the emergence of Turkish-German literature.

The Brecht-Dialog, the context for Rülicke-Weiler's remarks, was the first international Brecht conference, which was convened in East Berlin in February 1968 in honor of Brecht's seventieth birthday. With the motto “Politics at the Theater”—a phrase taken from Brecht's Katzgraben- Notate—it had been organized jointly by three prominent East German cultural institutions, the Berliner Ensemble, the Academy of Arts, and the Center of the International Theater Institute (ITI), which conceived of the conference as an “encounter of progressive theater practitioners and literary scholars from many countries” and placed the practicability of Brecht's working methods in differing social settings at the center of their agenda.

THE FOCUS OF THIS BOOK HAS BEEN literary encounters between Turkish and German writers and theater intellectuals. The discussion began in the 1950s with the Erlangen student theater festival, which preceded the labor recruitment contract between Turkey and Germany in 1961 that marked the beginning of large-scale Turkish (labor) immigration to West Germany. In this book I have uncovered the significant influence of Turkish cultural-political debates and literary practices on German cultural traditions in the decades since the Second World War, showing how international collaboration and exchange focusing on Brecht proved central for negotiations of the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the German and Turkish public spheres. The Turkish Brecht reception, as the first chapter illuminated, drew from a variety of intersecting discourses and practices, on the national and international level, that thought beyond Cold War divisions, and consulted Brechtian theory and practice as it took shape in both East and West German institutions. Turkish dramatists and directors, I argued there, emphasized the necessity of adapting Brechtian concepts to address national concerns as well as political and historical events, and of placing them in dialogue with Turkish aesthetic traditions and the Turkish literary left.

Even as I explored the significance of the Turkish archive for Turkish- German and German studies, my analysis also revealed its continued relevance for studying the work that prominent Turkish-German writers Aras Ören and Emine Sevgi Özdamar wrote after their emigration to Germany. Furthermore, my analysis highlighted the cultural effects of Turkish immigration and the inscription of Turkish subjects into German discourses of working-class culture and literary politics beyond ethnicity and nationality in divided Germany. Ören's involvement in leftist artist circles foregrounded the collaboration between intellectuals and the working class. With Brecht's work at their very center, these debates focused on the intersection between aesthetics and politics. Ören introduced Turkish workers into German discourses on labor protest and working-class solidarity, presenting them as catalysts for change, providing a counter-perspective to predominant presentations of Turks as mute others in the German public. His preoccupation with Brecht, as I have illustrated, predated his move to West Berlin in 1969 and was rooted in his theater career. This career included Ören's work with the Gençlik Tiyatrosu ensemble, his participation in the Erlangen and Istanbul theater festivals, and his activities as a member of the Neue Buhne Frankfurt, all important venues.

First Deduction (137c4–142b3)

Parmenides begins the first deduction (and so the training as a whole) by stating the positive version of the hypothesis as the protasis of a conditional: “if one or unity (ἕν) is …” (137c4). He immediately concludes from this that it couldn't in any way be many, which Aristoteles affirms (137c4–5). This agreement constitutes the overarching premise of the first deduction: unity can have no compromise with plurality, but must be one in every respect. By considering the character of the one in its unity, and only in its unity, the first deduction considers unity with respect to itself. We will have to wait for the second deduction to consider the one with respect to what differ from it, which, as different, will be many. For the first deduction, the task will be to test the validity of the inference from the hypothesis that unity is to the conclusion that it is in no way many. To employ the language of the fourth part of Parmenides’ critique of the ϵἴδη, the first deduction will examine the consequences for the most precise unity, that unity characteristic of divine knowledge and most needed to guide human life predictably toward the good—it will examine providential knowledge. Accordingly, in the first deduction Parmenides tests the consequences for the demand of precision, eventually considering what effect meeting that demand has on our attempt to meet the demand of access. We see from the outset, then, how the training addresses the issues Parmenides raised in the greatest impasse.

The premise of unity's complete lack of plurality is first treated with respect to part/whole relationships. Parmenides claims it's necessary that neither is there a part of it nor is it a whole (137c5–6). Upon Aristoteles’ request, Parmenides clarifies what he means: the part is surely a part of a whole, while, regarding the whole, it would be that of which not one part is absent, both of which propositions Aristoteles affirms (137c6–8).

From the Parmenides we see that Socrates’ uniqueness seems to have resided in his discovery that the ϵἴδη are the ontology implicit in ƛόγος, a discovery that allowed him to resolve the debate between the two dominant schools of pre-Socratic philosophy, the monists and the pluralists. In so doing, Socrates appears all in one stroke to have rescued the reputation of philosophy and justified the use of all of ƛόγος as a means of guidance, be that use everyday or philosophic. Yet as Parmenides has shown, the ϵἴδη themselves are questionable, most pointedly as regards their central premise, the possibility of participation. And while he does not refute this premise, Parmenides does show that although participation is necessary to the guidance of ƛόγος, it can never be anything more than a postulate. By raising problems with our attempt to assess participation, Parmenides shows that ƛόγος cannot ultimately justify its own use, and that there is accordingly a horizon to the human being's attempt to speak meaningfully about the world. By inducing awareness of this horizon, Parmenides is able to guide us to a revised understanding of the ϵἴδη, for awareness of the horizon of ƛόγος leads us to ask why we are initially unaware of this horizon. Why are the ϵἴδη so distracting that we cannot even see that the premise of our use of ƛόγος—that is, the possibility of participation—isn't rationally grounded? What do they promise, that we should be so readily deceived?

Opening up this line of questioning, Parmenides looks to the unity of each ϵἶδος, which unity gives it its precision as this one thing: each is one and nothing but itself, completely separate from all the other ϵἴδη, i.e., unmixed. Such precision is what distinguishes the ϵἴδη from the visible things, in which contraries necessarily and incontrovertibly mix with one another, thus rendering them manifold and varied, leaving our speech about them convoluted and contradictory as a result.

Prior Schools of Interpretation

To speak of Plato's Parmenides as a work of political philosophy seems at best counterintuitive, at worst a distortion of the text. At once revered as “the most sublime dialectic there's ever been” and yet dismissed as a mere joke, this elusive little book still isn't so elusive as to be thought predominantly political. Such a claim seems on its face ridiculous, he who advances it guilty of wasting words on a fool's errand. Evidence in favor of this accusation lies in the scholarly treatment of the dialogue and the schools of interpretation generally. Those readers who emphasize the dramatic and political character of Plato's dialogues and Socratic philosophy usually shy away from the Parmenides, which consequently remains almost entirely under the sway of the Anglo-American tradition and what we might call its ontological and epistemological focus. Is the present study's novelty thus an attempt to maintain the integrity of the dramatic and political interpretation of Socratic-Platonic philosophy—to bring the Parmenides firmly into its fold, by hook or by crook? Far from it. Rather, the goal of the present study is to articulate the challenge the Parmenides poses to both schools of readers. The wondrous power of the Parmenides lies in its ability to undermine our general tendencies to dismiss metaphysics as too highfalutin for the real work of politics and to brush away politics as too dirty a business for the majesty of metaphysics.

Articulating the Parmenides’ challenge means giving an account of the centrality of political philosophy to philosophy generally, so as to arrive at the original meaning of political philosophy. Of course, only upon the conclusion of the present study may an adequate statement of this meaning be ventured. Nevertheless, a preliminary understanding of political philosophy is necessary to guide our thinking going forward, and is available to us through a brief meditation on the relationship of the Parmenides to the Republic, the dialogue on the nature of justice, the central topic of political philosophy.