The Betrayal of a Cultural Promise

There was a time when I believed in the future of my country, Turkey. Not with the romanticism of slogans or the illusions of hero worship, but with a growing sense of possibility that took shape during my formative years.

As a child and a young person in the 1980s, I absorbed the atmosphere of a country grappling with the aftermath of the 1980 military coup. Though I could not fully grasp its implications at the time, the experience left an imprint. Later, as I matured intellectually in the 1990s and beyond, I began to reflect more critically on Turkey's political and cultural trajectory.

I once believed that Turkey's unique geographical position at the crossroads of diverse cultures, religions, languages, histories, economic models, and political systems demanded a well-educated, intellectually robust, and open-minded society.

People who live in this geography and reflect on what it means to exist at the heart of such an important intersection can and should understand how imperative it is to develop the ability to think and live in a multifaceted way. Cultural richness is not born of geography alone, but from its fusion with intellectual diversity. It does not come by birth alone, either.

The ability to engage comfortably and meaningfully with both East and West could have elevated Turkey's international standing peacefully. Yet, we have witnessed the opposite.

My thoughts do not contain any nationalistic views or emphasis. Even if someone considers themselves a patriot, patriotism should be understood simply as an appreciation of the culture into which one is born.

The people of Turkey should be able to enjoy and learn from other cultures by building on their own historically rich and inherited cultural foundation. Turkey stands on the cultural legacies of the Hattians, Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians, Greeks, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Seljuk Turks, Ottomans, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, Jews, Christians, and many others. Shouldn’t this heritage be an invitation to embrace the world with openness and peace?

The intellectual quality of the public sphere has deteriorated drastically since the 1980s. Politics has played a major role in Turkish society's freefall. Successive governments, regardless of ideology, have deepened this erosion by hollowing out democratic institutions, suppressing dissent, and instrumentalizing the judiciary, media, and education system for political gain. Far from harnessing its strengths, Turkey now struggles even to govern itself socially, demographically, politically, and democratically.

Intellect has been displaced by force, and tyrannical power has become the dominant language of society. Over the years, my belief has substantially eroded. I have watched institutions rot from within, democratic norms be discarded, and people’s trust in institutions, media, and the rule of law replaced by political manipulation and lies. Today, Turkey has become an autocracy. What has unfolded confirms the very fears I held as a young observer. I did not want to be right, but historical developments in recent decades have proved me correct.

Turkey's social, political, and economic trajectory brings not satisfaction, but sorrow. This intellectual and emotional experience echoes the path of a thinker: Thomas Mann.

Born into the imperial grandeur of late 19th-century Germany, Mann believed deeply in the cultural supremacy of his homeland. For him, Germany meant Goethe, Beethoven, Kant—a nation of inwardness, philosophy, and moral seriousness. In his early writings, such as Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Mann clung to an idealized version of German Kultur over Western Zivilisation. Then came 1933. The embrace of fascism by the very people who had inherited Goethe’s language was a rupture Mann could not ignore.

In exile, he denounced Nazism with increasing urgency, delivering radio broadcasts to Germans in the mother tongue he refused to surrender. “Where I am, there is Germany,” he declared, staking a moral claim to a spiritual homeland even as the physical one collapsed.

He once wrote in despair: Ich hasse alles, was deutsch ist (“I hate everything that is German”). But this was not the hatred of abandonment. It was the agony of betrayal. Mann had believed in his country’s cultural promise. What he could not forgive was the corruption of that promise into myth, chauvinism, and violence.

In Lotte in Weimar, Mann used Goethe’s shadow to interrogate what Germany had become. Through the lens of Charlotte Kestner’s return, he explored how genius had been elevated into cult, and how real lives were sacrificed to symbols. In Doctor Faustus, the theme darkened further. Germany’s soul, personified in the brilliant composer Adrian Leverkühn, is sold to the devil in exchange for artistic greatness. This was Mann’s diagnosis of the Faustian bargain that German culture had struck with fascism.

I feel Mann's narrative in my bones.

We, too, have elevated history into spectacle, turned founders into myths, and surrendered our institutions to the whims of personality cults. Like Mann’s Germany, Turkey betrayed its better self. And as Mann never ceased to be German, I do not cease to be Turkish. I remain tethered to it by birth.

I write not from an exile of distance, but from an exile of disillusionment. My citizenship is not of soil or party, but of memory and critique. To be right about one’s country’s decline is a lonely form of clarity. It is neither pride nor prophecy. It is responsibility.

Like Mann, I will continue to write, to remember, and to insist that another future remains possible even if that future now lives only in words.