Ottoman History Podcast - Ottoman Children and the First World War

Episode Date: December 9, 2019

Episode 440 with Nazan Maksudyan hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Children are often imagined as victims of war or passive bystanders. But in this episode, Nazan Maksudyan is back on the program to talk about how the First World War looked through the eyes of Ottoman children and their lives as historical actors during and after the conflict. We explore the experience of child workers and the many situations faced by children throughout the war, and we also explore the themes of survival and resilience as expressed in the experience of children, especially Ottoman Armenians. We also discuss the challenges of writing amid a tumultuous period for Turkey and an experience of exile.  « Click for More »

So Yashar Kemal made these amazing journalistic interviews with street children, working children, migrant children, poor children. In an interview he gave himself in 1957, he said, I don't treat children like kids. If I have a friendship, a relationship with a child, then he or she is my friend, not a child. I don't see them as kids. I don't treat them like a different human species. Why? I never believed that it's right to treat children as kids. They are fully fledged human beings." And in Turkish she says, Çocuklar insandır. So this is, I think that is the beginning for me. I met up with historian Nazan Maksudyan in Berlin to discuss her new book,

Ottoman Children and Youth During World War I. Trying to see children within this story either enlightens something that has been more or less known, or you can come up with a completely new story. Children are normally presented as vulnerable victims of political events like wars, but Maksudian has put them at center stage. There is a pretty different side of the story, where children define themselves as really resilient, as really strong, talented in most of the cases, and being able to cope with the situation.

In many cases, people who experienced the war as children did go on to remember it in terms of a loss of innocence. If you define childhood, you know, as a concept with protection and a family life, then yes, this was the end of childhood for most of the children during the war. Children were also put in many difficult situations during the war. But Maksudian has found plenty of cases of such kids taking matters into their own hands, such as Ottoman child workers sent to Germany. These children were, okay, exploited and suffering in these mines, that's for sure,

but they were also trying to find solutions for themselves. They were coming together and revolting. Or going to the Turkish embassy and finding a way to be sent home. And this was also true for Ottoman Armenian children. In one story, you see them, you see the victim, you see the suffering. And in the other picture, you see the survivor, you see the suffering, and in the other picture you see the survivor and the life. I see trauma and empowerment side by side. In this interview, we'll explore the diverse experiences of Ottoman children during the First World War

and consider what, if anything, was shared among them. And we'll also talk about the stressful process of writing history in exile and the improbable role that children played in making it easier for Nazanmak Sudyun. I think having two children and having a work to do helped me a lot. Without them, it would have been a more difficult time. Welcome to Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. This episode is on the theme of children and the First World War in the Ottoman Empire. And our guest is a return guest on the podcast, Nazan Maksudian.

Hi. Hi, Nazan. It's great to have you back. Yeah, it's great to be back. Nazan Maksudian is Einstein guest professor at the Free University or Freie Universität and a research associate with the Mark Bloch Center here in Berlin, where we're recording on the mobile setup for Ottoman History Podcast. Nazan, we had you on the program a couple times, talk about children before. The first time was to talk about your first book, Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire, 2014. And you've been very active since then. You've now got another book out. The latest

Nazan Maksudian book is entitled Ottoman Children and Youth During World War I, out in 2019 from Syracuse University Press. Congratulations. Thanks. Yeah, it's great to see this book coming out, and I've been following the project for a while. What we'll be doing in this podcast is sort of setting up the context for the study of the history of children, how children offer a unique window onto the history of the First World War, and then maybe we'll get into some of the cases that you look at in the book. Yeah, sure. I want to start by having you read this quote from the celebrated novelist Yasha Kemal, one of Turkey's great writers, who has this very famous and poignant quotation about children.

Yeah, I would be happy to. I don't treat children like kids. children. Yeah, I would be happy to. I don't treat children like kids. If I have a friendship, a relationship with a child, then he or she is my friend, not a child. I don't see them as kids. I don't treat them like a different human species. Why? I never believed that it's right to treat children as kids. They are fully fledged human beings. And in Turkish, he says, they are fully fledged human beings. And in Turkish he says, Çocuklar insandır.

So this is, I think that is the beginning for me, you know. Even if I've never been like this sophisticated to put it into words, but this is the beginning for me, for this research, and for the previous research as well, that children are human and we need to treat them as such. And in the historical research, children can also be our witnesses, our actors, our agents. And if you treat them as such, then you really have answers. And it's a very elegant way of putting it

because a lot of the history of children and childhood is about breaking down this construct of what the child is, what childhood means, not assuming that children are just exactly the same as adults or that in history there was no prior conceptions of the child, but rather, first and foremost, they are historical actors and players in history, just like any other group that we would study. Maybe you can start by telling our listeners what you think the experience of the child in history brings to the study of the First World War, whether more broadly or in the Ottoman context, especially because there's really a lot of social history of the war

coming out now, but a lot of it deals very little with the experience of children, or if it touches on the experience of children, it's really only as passive actors, victims, but in a very flat sense. And as your book shows, there's a lot more going on there. Yeah, I mean, I give this example, I think, in the introduction with Rashomon, you know, how the entire story changes when you add a new witness. And this is also my conviction that if you try to find children, you either have a different version of what has been written or an additional history. So I think for

the first chapter is, for instance, on Ottoman state orphanages, Dar-i Leyten. There has been work on Dar-i Leyten, mostly in Turkish. And the way I've read it, you know, the way I knew about it was that, you know, Ottoman state was trying to take care of Muslim orphans and the archives were full of petitions and things like that asking for entry and they weren't able, blah, blah. And when I think in another interview, when somebody asked me, so do you think, I mean, these state orphanages were targeting Armenian orphans? This was like, again, five years ago. I was saying, well, I mean, like, again, five years ago, I was saying, well, I mean, so far, what I've found is that they were full. And I think, I mean, given the genocidal situation as well, I think they were preferring or, you know, prioritizing Muslim children. But then getting into this, like, detail in this

research, I realized that they were actually targeting Armenian children too. I mean, they were full with Armenian children. Some of them had entirely an Armenian population and some of them had like 60% of it. So this changed the story. And for the chapter two, for instance, when I was trying to find what was going on with children, I came across the story of orphans being shipped, not shipped, sent by train to Germany. And so this was also a surprise for many colleagues that this was happening. And following these children, I think, brought into another perspective about the relationship between Ottomans and Germans regarding the issue of collaboration,

partnership, colonialism in a way so these are some examples i mean i can give other examples from the book but the main idea is that trying to see children within this story either enlightens something that has been more or less known, or you can come up with a completely new story. So an important theme in your book and in your earlier work as well has been the agency of children in history. And it's interesting to read what actual voices of children we have from the past whether they come from orphanage records or various institutions that dealt with children and just to see how they narrate their experiences often in the active voice i've noticed as opposed to when you see

people writing about children it's usually in the passive voice could you talk more about children as agents during the war i mean again i think it's more related to your perspective to your approach if you ask the question i mean if you are looking for an answer to children's experiences or to children's views of the thing there is a way to find it um and as you said i mean there has been work on the home front and not so much but we see there's work on starvation illness diseases uh suffering that has been done which is the case but i think trying to look at it from the children's experiences also shows that children had ways of coping with this suffering. And this is what I was trying to do. I mean, in looking at this orphan children sent to Germany to different workplaces, even mines,

to different workplaces, even mines, you know, they've been working in mines, it's possible to tell this story as the first and saddest episode of migration to Germany, you know, because since I presented it here in some places and the Turkish community was interested in this story because it's the same kind of same story for them. But what I want to stress from another perspective is that these children were, okay, exploited and suffering in these mines, that's for sure, but they were also trying to find solutions for themselves. They were coming together and revolting.

They were escaping to Friedrichstrasse. They were trying to stay in pensions or find other jobs or going to the Turkish embassy and finding a way to be sent home. And so this is adding a new dimension to it, I think, how they were doing something themselves. And in the chapter about the genocide, which we can also talk in detail later I see that survival was more telling than the intent to kill in a sense I mean in one story you see them you see the victim you see the suffering and in the other picture you see

the survivor and the life right and this is one of the points where we have to put aside our construction of the child as someone who is fragile vulnerable needs to be protected all all true in a way but also it kind of of masks the fact that children may be resilient, even resilient in ways that adults are unable to be resilient. They're able to cope with things in different ways than adults in some cases. people who experienced the war as youngsters, as children, looked back on it as a time of sort of loss of childhood, loss of innocence, maybe even an aborted childhood that never happened because the war forced a lot of people into adult situations due to the exigencies. Could you elaborate more on that?

Well, as you said, if you define childhood, you know, as a concept with protection and a family life, then yes, this was the end of childhood for most of the children during the war. And from another perspective, losing a parent is also losing your childhood. You know, even if you are not the children anymore, even for adults, losing a parent is like losing a big thing you know in terms of your identity so in that sense yes i mean this was a lost childhood but then what i try to bring to the book is that part of the story is that we see children as you said as vulnerable as passive

as unable to do things and doing things is sometimes too much for a child. Then he or she feels like, oh, I wasn't doing all these things, you know. And I found some quotes on that. I wasn't following the events. I didn't know much about what was going on in the political side of the story. But these children had to learn about what was going on if the ceasefire was signed so they knew about these like political military details which affected their lives and this knowledge also made them feel like yeah we weren't children anymore it's not only because of suffering i argue

it's also because an empowerment an enlarged field of agency but what i also try to do is that you can be more of an agent and you can also be a child these two do not exclude each other so i think that although these children were in a sad situation in terms of losing their families lives uh parents and they were doing so much more than children a decade ago or two decades after still they were they were also doing childly things like play friendship what we read in children's books. I mean, so I think I find myself, I also sometimes see, well, do I expect too much of these generation? You know, okay, they were both adult-like.

They were sometimes called like precocious adults, but they also had a childhood. It's hard to deny that they didn't have a childhood. But then, yeah, this is looking from a distance. Many of them said that they didn't have a childhood. Right. And of course, a lot of that in retrospect has to do with how the child is continually being reformulated after the First World War and after the Second World War and up until today. So there's a lot of, you know, context that has to be restored. One of the interesting things you point out in the book is that,

as you just kind of said, children had to be aware of political events. And not just that, that actually children become polarized in the way that adults are becoming polarized during the war. And this is reflected in their daily life and in their play, as you say, all these different facets. Yeah, yeah yeah absolutely i mean i think in her work on the end of the habsburg empire you know more in healy does that as well what it is like in a multinational multi-ethnic multi-religious empire during the war i think her work is really admirable. I also tried to do this. It's, in most of the cases, difficult because of language reasons, because of my specialization,

etc. But I also tried to show that it was entirely different to be a Muslim Turkish kid, to be an Armenian kid, to be a Greek kid, to be a Jewish kid, to be an Arab kid. You know, you have all these different dynamics that is coming all these versions of future that is being passed to the new generation and well it is now being strongly discussed that well was this Ottoman Ottomanism Ottoman identity worked at any point really I mean I mean, you know, we are making it smaller and smaller from 1908 to 1912, maybe. But maybe it was only in Istanbul. So this is being discussed a lot, you know.

Was there ever an embracing Ottoman identity? This is another question. But during the war, it is obvious that children had different expectations from the war and different imaginations of the future to come for example most of the paramilitary organizations that were allowed to function were turkish muslim organizations and the propaganda in there was only about a Turkish Muslim future. They were excluding all other nationalities, without doubt, and religions.

And here, I mean, this wasn't my central issue, you know, scouting in a sense, but the work on Turkish Muslim scouting, even if they don't usually call it Turkish Muslim, the available scouting activities during the war were only about Turkish Muslim children, and you see the vision there. It is pretty much there.

As for the other communities, you know, Greeks or Armenians were disallowed. They couldn't even have sports uh associations i mean the armenians is another story they weren't even allowed to function their schools but and in their sense you see you you do not find as much evidence of what was going on during the war you know what was the expectation. But the chapter on genocide pretty much shows that the first concern was to survive, you know, was to survive the war. And immediately after the war, you see a similar national awakening that Lena discusses in her book,

you know, I mean. And this was, yeah, on on the one hand pushed by the unionist increasing obvious muslim turkish sensibilities and that the future is going to be like that for them and so the other communities were going to other directions and the war again is central in this divergence we're going to talk more about that in just a bit. We're going to have a quick music break, and then we'll come back with Nazan Maksudian talking about the experience of children during the First World War in the Ottoman Empire.

Stay tuned. so so Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. Chris Grayton here talking with Nazan Maksudian about her new book, Ottoman Children and Youth During World War I, out from Syracuse University Press. Nazan, we've already alluded to the distinctive experience of Armenian children during the war within the context of the Armenian Genocide. And for children, this experience often meant losing a parent, if not both parents, losing family members, sometimes being incorporated into new families, sometimes strange families. The broad strokes are kind of known from the historiography of the genocide. But there's also this question of what it means to be a survivor,

to survive such an event. And children offer a fascinating window onto this. So could you share more about this, what the history of what the experience of child survivors was like, this, what the history of, what the experience of child survivors was like, and maybe even talk about how children offer a window onto recovery from these big communal disasters and traumas represented by the war. I think this was also a surprise for me, you know, starting to read memoirs, testimonies in different forms about children who survived, I started with more of this a sad feeling that well how am I going to read about all these sad stories, it's really a hard thing to do you know

as a researcher to be exposed to so much pain in a sense, but then I realized that very quickly in these narratives, there is a pretty different side of the story where children define themselves as really resilient, as really strong, talented in most of the cases, and being able to cope with the situation this was something more of a surprise to me and i realized that more and more that these stories are usually less adventure and the survival that they could experience or I mean, yeah, they could come to life in a sense. And one of the experiences you refer to is Garnik Panayan's memoir of his time in the Antura orphanage, which has been translated and published in English, and has a lot of these stories of adventure and survival. Yeah, yeah, a lot. I mean, in Panyan's memoir, you have a lot of it, but in others as well, for instance, this very strong memoir by Avedis Abrahamian, close to the beginning, he says, well, I mean, I think I question often how we could

really survive from this, you know, because the circumstances were incredible. And then he comes up with a number of answers. One answer is that there were a lot of people experiencing the same thing with us. So in that sense, he makes it not like a personal trauma or a personal experience, but he stresses that this was a very common societal situation and then we did it together, like the solidarity is there. But the second thing he says is that we were aware that the aim was to kill us and our will I mean

our struggle to survive was very important we soon realized that survival was the main goal and we should survive no matter what so here again there is something very different from what the perspective of trauma would tell you you know i was reading a lot of trauma theory as well and in there you have the person who is traumatized mostly as a silent person unable to tell the story and mostly as an inactive person you know unable to do things you know like pacified what can i do kind of thing but here in this story with children i see trauma and empowerment side by side you know it's they went through horrible things, that's for sure. But these horrible things were not necessarily suppressing them and making little. But in some cases, it just made them more resilient and more willing to survive.

Yeah. Again, to reiterate the point we've made earlier, that we have to abandon some of our uninterrogated assumptions about what it means to suffer trauma as a child, not assuming that because we try to protect children from traumatic events, that they're actually impacted in a worse way or same way as adults perhaps children because of the nature of their physiology because their nature their psychology perhaps because of their role in society as as marked as non-adult have ways of coping with trauma that adults don't have access to yeah absolutely i mean play in that sense was very important and while all these adults were detached from their work life you know in as a i mean now in my personal life i feel like work is a really helpful thing when you are going through difficult times you know you come to your office you work and this work

is a way to detach yourselves from other traumatic experiences so in this genocidal circumstance adults were more or less detached from what they used to do but children as we read were still able to play hide and seek they were still able to play other games that they used to play in their villages so this is amazing to see that they had this different tools to cope with the trauma as you said I mean the research on the Holocaust also stresses the same point and but you do also emphasize that the war's experience produces a child with a different sense of their if we're talking about the Armenians, the place of their community in the world, what it means to be Armenian, in this case to survive. In these narratives, it's really obvious that the children sensed the threat,

you know, the threat of losing their armenian language their their religion and their names in most of these accounts of survival you either have an episode in a home or in an orphanage or in some other institutional situation and the first uh what was first targeted was their name and their language they weren't allowed to use their names, their names were changed, and they weren't allowed to use Armenians. Even if they found other Armenians in next village or in the same house sometimes, what was surveyed most was these names and languages. And if they were, I I would say older than six or

something they were trying to hold on to this you know you see that they they devised a form of resistance among themselves that we're going to resist and save our names because they took away I mean this is also a very um common point that is being made in testimonies we lost our homes we lost our parents we're not going to lose our names this is and a name is a pretty strong thing and so here you see this like awareness that they're going to And so here you see this like awareness that they're going to save something about their original identities. And in the post-war, with the organization of, for instance, scouting in different parts in Dörtüyl, in Izmir, in Istanbul, you see this kind of revival in the possibility that okay we survived the worst which means that we're pretty strong and we can be really stronger so this experience has a huge impact on that but

having said this like six years of age that i mentioned i think age I mean I say I use the word children over and over again but actually this children category is pretty big you know I mean very young children which we call usually babies you know one year old two year olds they weren't it wasn't so easy to survive for them if they weren't saved. I mean, we know that younger children died instantly. And for those who were three or four, then you have the problem of memory, identity, how to resist. And the post-war discussions of repatriating Armenians muslim households is very much related to that in some cases it was obvious to the armenian community that this particular child was from an armenian family but he or she was two three at the beginning of the war and after four years of

a muslim household experience he or she had no memories of this Armenian past. And then how is it going to be settled? Then he or she was again forcefully taken away from this household because it was sure that the child was Armenian. Yeah, you have diverse experiences, ranging from very young children who have been completely integrated into Muslim households and essentially there's like a campaign to bring them back. from very young children who have been completely integrated into muslim households and are

essentially there's like a campaign to bring them back and then you also have cases of children who were very young when separated from their families lived for years as shepherds and then turn up at orphanages on their own still remembering that they were armenian even while going on with their lives so it's a very complex picture yeah mean, this age business is also very important, and gender is, of course, very important. I try to read as much testimonies as I can from girl survivors, but I also have to admit that most of the information is coming from male survivors in some sense.

So Nazan, I want to ask you, we've talked about the specificity of the Armenian experience, but was there something about the experience of Ottoman children during the war that transcended these communal boundaries that become more rigid and reinforced by everything that happens during the war? This is an excellent question, and I wish I was dealing with it with the book,

because the book is called Ottoman Children and Youth in the Ottoman Empire. So the book, I mean, the Muslim versus non-Muslim, you know, I have to make all these differences. Well, in terms of the experience of the war, I think some things are, of course, common. What has been written on the home front suffering, you know, especially the excellent book by Yiğit Akın, it shows that the experience of hunger, the experience of disease was pretty much common. Depending on, again, provinces, this changed, but you see a huge extent of suffering that was covering the empire as a whole but still um i think the experience of

genocide was something else which made the armenian experience entirely different it is hard to liken a war experience to a genocide experience i mean these people were not only uprooted but they were also chased hunted down so you have these stories as well how they were hiding from authorities so it's not like you're poor you're hungry you have to eat grass many ottomans were doing it. But in the case of Armenians, they were also hunted and chased. And they were really under a death threat until late 1918. So this was an entirely different experience. And what this book is trying to do first is that to situate the Armenian genocide within First World War historiography, which I think important because we usually separate these fields, First World War studies,

genocide studies. Chronologically it makes sense to situate it within the First World War, but then also to stress that this was a different kind of suffering. This wasn't the same experience that other Ottoman subjects had. Armenians had an entirely different experience. Which is well reflected in the experience of Armenian children in particular. Well we're gonna have a little more conversation, we're gonna take another quick music break and then be back with Nazan Maksudian talking not just about the book, but the process of writing the book. So stay tuned. Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. Chris Grayton here with Nazan Maksudian talking about her new book,

Ottoman Children and Youth During World War I. Nazan, you mentioned, you alluded to the fact that work can be an escape from sort of the trials of the times. And I wanted to ask you about your writing process, research process with this book, how it influenced the formation of the book, because you've published this work in a relatively short amount of time and under incredibly stressful conditions. You mentioned in your acknowledgement stressful conditions for yourself personally, now living as an exile currently in Germany, but also stressful

conditions within Turkish academia as a whole, where you started out working on this book a few years ago. Tell me more about the experience. I went back to Turkey in 2011 after a very fruitful stay in Berlin. And then the first two years were okay, because in 2013 we had the Gizli uprisings. were okay because in 2013 we had we had the Gizi uprisings and it was a good time you know like morally giving us strength about being in Turkey the possibility of politics etc and at the time for instance I wrote a piece called uh going out and play because what Gizi meant to me was really like a fragment of a lost childhood that we had.

It was possible now to go out, to be in the public space and to play and, I mean, to do political activism. Right, because you're a child of the 80s, which was not a time where that was very easy to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so in two years, I mean, in 2015 already, the wave was, the tide was turning. And 2016, the coup was kind of the peak point of it that made us really concerned about the future, what is going to be here i mean the the sheer idea that a coup can happen again in turkey was uh very scary so this i mean this was the most of it but from another perspective the university was going down you know there was all sorts of pressures after the signing of the peace petition so it all started in January 2016

and get worsened, worsened, worsened. And the coup was the moment when I decided that, okay, we need to leave. So yeah, I wrote to colleagues here and I had the possibility of alumni scholarship from Humboldt because I was a Humboldt before. So I came here in first of October 2016 so this was pretty quick after the coup and yeah I mean this book project started I mean I

started writing about it like a long time ago I think I've written the first thing about the First World War in 2013. So it was, I mean, it had small pieces, but here, coming here was the chance to write the book actually and to finish it. And I always, I mean, so in acknowledgement, I also say that, you know, the home is where your children are. This is part of the story. I mean, having, I think, having two children and having a work to do helped me a lot to go through these difficult times. Because having children also means for the adults that you have to wake up in the morning, you have to prepare breakfast and you have to do all sorts of other things, clean the house. have to prepare breakfast and you have to do all sorts of other things clean the house whereas as a single person you can be depressed and you can stay in bed you cannot work you cannot have breakfast it happens but when you have the children then you have to do all these things

and i'm grateful to them you know i mean without them it would have been more difficult time and work as well I mean having a work to do an office is a blessing and and going out of the house and sitting down and trying to finish things is I mean what gives you yeah a moment of happiness I mean to finish something so and and I'm really motivated by finishing things. And I don't like things to linger. So, yeah, I mean, I call myself an exile. I have no problem with the designation. Whereas this is not, maybe this is not so true, like legally true, because I can actually go back to Turkey. But then it's a different experience. I know for a fact that I won't be able to live in Istanbul in the coming future.

And which is a heavier feeling that makes me feel like I'm in exile now. Because, you know, I was born and raised in Istanbul. I never lived in another place, even for my PhD. I mean, I did some research in Paris, six months, a year. I stayed in Berlin for two years. But these were never, these were always temporary states and I always defined my home as Istanbul. And now seeing that I might not live there, you know, as my home in the coming future is creating the feeling of exile. Not that I a real you know i'm really kicked out

yeah well one of the interesting things you just said there and thank you for sharing that with us is again this inversion of the role of the child the role of the child in your life being sort of okay the kid's gonna be okay and i can if i I focus on the kids will help me manage this situation. It's very stressful for me, having had to uproot myself from the place that I called home for so long. And I want to ask you, bringing it back to the history and historiography, you know, you've written a book that is the latest contribution to a whole wave of scholarship, on one hand, on the social history of the war, and on the social history of the Armenian genocide, which is really still yet to be written because of how focused it was on sort of the question of genocide itself, the political context. And in Turkey,

this is a big deal. You know, you started, you said, around 2013. I remember I was in Istanbul, too, at that time, you had a conference on children in the first world war there were many conferences in which people were for the first time in turkey's history in a sustained manner talking about questions that had been suppressed for many decades in the historiography not just the armenian genocide but many such questions with 2016 and everything that happened, particularly the failed coup and of course the backlash against the coup, one wonders what will be the future of this historiographical trend, which you now carry on here in Germany through this book. But what do

you see happening? Will this historiographical awakening, so to speak, in Turkish society survive? I mean, I personally, I feel like it's really impossible to continue publishing these things, organizing such events in Turkey, publishing such things from a Turkish affiliated position. I think it's very difficult. I mean, I had a number of experiences in the past two years. You know, I was writing short literary critiques to this internet journal and I was doing it on a monthly basis. I did it for four years, you know, every month a novel and a short critique. And in December 2016, I wrote something on the book by Şahan Şahnur,

which was translated into Turkish by Aras, and I was using the word genocide, obviously. And the editor told me that, well, you know, we have been approached recently by our lawyers and we don't want to use the word genocide again. And I was like, you you know I was using it for the past four years I mean it's not the first time I use it and they say well we don't think it's good now so I stopped writing for them I mean I sent the review elsewhere it was published fine

but then I had this weird feeling and then I was invited to a conference which about the end of the war. And then they told me, well, I mean, please don't use the title, the word genocide in your title. When you come here, you can speak as you like. But then it's I said, I don't do it anymore. You know, I might have done it if I had a job in Turkey. But is the pressures that you have I mean in in my university right after the coup the main discussion that I had with the administration was to use or not to use the book of Zücher you know Turkey a modern history which I was using for the basic history of Turkey class all the time but but since he made a declaration on the genocide the year before,

I was asked not to use it. And I was saying, well, what? So I'm sure, I mean, people are having all sorts of pressures about organizing events, doing things. It's becoming impossible. As you said, in 2014, this huge First World War conference organized by Tarik Vakfu and Orient Institute Istanbul was a huge event, and the genocide was a main topic in this conference. And then what happened afterwards in the, you know,

I mean, the centenary was big in entire Europe. I mean, I'm writing an article on the centenary in Turkey. And what I see is that 2014 and 15 was interesting, interesting stuff was happening. But after 2015, in a sense, all you have is state-sponsored official commemorations and not so much civil society initiatives that is more interested in discussing the event as such. In terms of academic production, yeah, I mean, as I said, being in Turkey is a difficulty. It's hard to write stuff or go to conferences with these kind of hot topics. But then being outside is also another issue now my this project of mine was on the first world war it's still interesting for a wider public you know we're still we were still in the centenary so it can be done here as well but in the future i always have to think, you know, what would be more interesting for a German public.

I mean, I've written a project proposal about the genocide, more about the genocide. And it was about, yeah, little child, children's education as well. It has an interactive thing to it. And it was rejected. interactive thing to it and it was rejected and because they were thinking well you know a project entirely about the genocide is not so much within the interest of german research funding so then you have to come up with things that is interesting for German funders, which makes you also shift away from your main interests. So we'll see how is it going to work out in the future. From the institutional perspective, you really see how fragile

this new era of academic freedom in Turkey was. But on the other hand, I do wonder, thinking outside of the academy for a second, outside of the office, can you put the cat back in the bag? What happens with all those students who were exposed to a new version of history, who started to ask questions for the first time on a mass level,

who started to imagine a multicultural Turkey that embraces diversity, who voted for a predominantly Kurdish party, not because they were Kurdish or had anything to do with that, but because of solidarity. Or for those who experienced the Gezi protests, not just in Istanbul, but throughout Turkey, the wave of street demonstrations and also online activism and organization. What happens to that, to those young people, to that generation for whom, just like the kids of the First World War, that was their formative moment? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is also a great issue. just like the kids of the first world war that was their formative moment yeah absolutely i mean this is also a great issue from how i see it i mean although my age is not that age you know although i was a lot older than this generation when this like the the spring was happening on us you know i feel like it it opened me so much that I find it very difficult

to live as closed. And so that made my life difficult in Turkey. And this is why I couldn't have lived there and I couldn't raise my children there. This is what made me live so this is partly survival you know you maybe not so dramatic it's to live you know so you had an experience you had an opening and the closure of it and living in the same society where you see so much possibilities are all closed is also difficult this made me leave the country and this is also my fear that yeah quite a number of people from this generation also left the country now i have here students from boasici you know great students and they say well i mean we realized that we couldn't finish our degrees there so we just moved to Berlin and I'm sure it's all over the place it's happening all over the place and so this is the uh this is the

sadness with it you know I mean you had this like this potential this moment and when you lose hope, which happens sometimes, I mean, happened to me, then you try to find a life elsewhere. So the question is, how much can you resist? And how much you're more interested to leave these freedoms again? to leave these freedoms again. Because leaving those freedoms in Turkey is not so much possible anymore. I mean, I'm sorry that I finished with this pessimistic line. Maybe you can cut it.

It's fine. Well, one does wonder what is in store. Our interview will be a historical document about that experience and where it takes you and where it takes Turkey. quite naturally ventured into some interesting parallels, at least on the psychological and political dimension, the tension that exists right now between the First World War period, obviously a very different period in Turkey's history, but nonetheless, having some shared aspects. I do appreciate you talking to us on the program. As always, it's great to have you on. And I really enjoyed having the opportunity to chat about this new book.

And congratulations again on publishing it. I want to remind our listeners that if they want to check out Nazan Maksudian's latest work, Ottoman Children and Youth During World War I from Syracuse University Press, all you have to do is go to our website where you'll find a link to that book as well as a bibliography pertaining to today's discussion. That's also a place where you'll find many other episodes related to the First World War and even a few episodes in both

English and Turkish on the history of children in the Ottoman Empire. So please do check that out. Nazan, thanks again for coming on. Thanks again, Chris, for being here. I want to thank all of you at home for listening and invite you to join in next time in another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. Thank you.