Knowledge about Turks and Turkey in education. An inquiry of the discoursive development 1839-1945

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Ingrid Lohmann
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 375424509

The purpose of our project is to analyse the knowledge of Turks and Turkey circulating among educators in Germany and its discursive change between 1839 and 1945. Such knowledge was constituted through textbooks for school use and teachers periodicals (Lehrerzeitungen), that provided them professional support and affirmation, as well as through pedagogical journals and reference works. In concert with sources from other social contexts, these created an identifiable discourse in the sense of a historically specific range of conceivable and expressible knowledge intersecting with and shaped by social power relations. Three questions lie at the heart of our analysis: Firstly, how did leading educationists (Schulmänner), pedagogues and teachers contribute to constituting, structuring and altering knowledge of Turks and Turkey? Secondly, how did they refer to other areas of knowledge and adjoining discourses in this process? Thirdly, how did the position and function of education change over the period studied? To identify its contribution to the discourse on Turks and Turkey, we will also investigate how the educational field referred to other levels of discourse e.g. in academia, politics, business and the mass media. The beginning and end of the period studied are both marked by historical events that greatly influenced shifts in the knowledge about Turks and Turkey in Germany. In 1839, the Tanzimat (pl., Arabic for reordering) era began in the Ottoman Empire. These reforms created e.g. the legal basis to introduce equal status for Muslims and non-Muslims in the Empire, provided assurances for the safeguarding of private property in civil law, and were generally regarded as bringing the Ottoman state closer to the European model of constitutional nation states. The fact that the Tanzimat reforms were praised by German observers through comparison with the Prussian reform era of the early 19th century makes this a promising starting point. We begin our analysis with the earliest reactions to Tanzimat in the German states and carry it forward to the period of stagnation in the production of pedagogical knowledge on Turks and Turkey that, for a variety of reasons, can be noted in the 1940s.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Christine Mayer