ISBN Turkey's Modernization : Refugees from Nazism and Atatürk's Vision

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 correspondence, memoirs, oral histories, photos, and other surviving evidence Arnold Reisman documents the fears, the courage, the heartaches, and the determination of these brilliant people as well as their contributions to shifting established paradigms in several fields of knowledge. He also speculates about Turkey's inabilities to fully capitalize on these emigres' legacy. The book is intended for lay readers interested in history of the 20th Century, history of science, history of Turkey, the Holocaust, and in a case study of post-Islamic national development.