Best 4 quotes of Stefan Ihrig on MyQuotes

Hitler repeatedly did everything he could to avoid upsetting the Turks. On two occasions he forbade military operations in Turkish waters when chasing the enemy. After Crete was taken, he stressed that except for a Kraft-durch-Freude (Strength through Joy) facility, nothing else, especially not military installations, could be built there, in order not to upset the Turks. The New Turkey was repeatedly invited to take part in the New Order of Europe

…In the eyes of a desperate and desolate Germany, this was a nationalist dream come true, or rather something like hyper-nationalist pornography…

lost incredible amounts of blood. Then the state literally breaks down because of hunger and the lack of everything. A collapse just as monumental as the German one, just translated into Turkish. Five years later it [the collapse] led to the Treaty of Sèvres [here he confused the Treaty of Sèvres with the Treaty of Lausanne], with the result that the Turkish Empire is founded again and that the world speaks with highest respect of this Turkish state. The inner strength had remained, it was instantly mobilized as soon as the man [Atatürk] came who managed to remind his people of its great tradition and who led them forward. That is what was different with us Germans

The Kemal-ist way to “make politics”— to wage war against the Entente for an honorable peace— was viewed as “active politics” par excellence. The opposite was what the papers diagnosed in the case of Germany: ful-fi llment politics, which in their eyes was either “passive politics” or not even politics at all. The Kladderadatsch cartoon “How to Revise a Peace Treaty” summarized this debate and Turkey’s role- model function perfectly. It ruled out historians, diplomats, and politi-cians as agents of revision. The one who achieves revision is a Turk, “saber in hand”—“action” instead of “talk.