Refuge in Research: Walter Ruben’s Exile and Internment in Turkey

Abstract

This paper follows the plight of Walter Ruben , an Indologist who had begun his career in Frankfurt am Main and later became one of the leading Indologists of the German Democratic Republic. In mid-1930s, he escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in Turkey. Relying on archival research in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the Prime Ministry's Republican Archives (BCA) in Istanbul, the Turkish press, and oral historical sources, together with the publications of Ruben during his Ankara years, I bring to light Ruben's life trajectory during his exile and internment with a balanced analysis of his 'production of knowledge' as a scholar at risk. The scholarly pressure and difficulties Ruben faced as an endangered scholar hired by a single-party authoritarian state delineate the precariousness and vulnerabilities of life as an exile academic. His original research and writing during his forced internment in Kırşehir, on the other hand, marks another dimension of his exile years, namely his endless effort to look for a real refuge within his intellectual production. 1 This research was completed thanks to a line of funding from the Einstein Stiftung supporting academic freedoms. I would also like to thank Prof. Oliver Janz for hosting me as an Einstein Guest Professor at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute at FU Berlin and providing me with the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper in his colloquium. Last but not the least, I am truly grateful to Lara Wankel for her diligent work as a research assistant, helping me bring together a range of scattered sources. My research stay between 2016 and 2018 at the ZMO, where I was part of "The Trajectories of Lives and Knowledge" group, had a crucial impact on the conception of this research agenda. In May 2018, I organized a conceptual PV together with Heike Liebau on "Exile and knowledge: practices, modes, aims and conditions of knowledge production in situations of exile." Later that year, I applied for the Einstein Stiftung's guest professorship program with a project on transnational academic connections between Germany and Turkey in the 1930s and 40s.