Barbaros Altug on Turkish author Sabahattin Ali’s celebrated Berlin novel…
“The sky was overcast and it was spitting rain. In the low clouds I could see the crimson reflection of the city’s lights. I had arrived at a long, wide avenue called Kurfürstendamm. Here the entire sky was illuminated, casting an orange light on the rain as it fell. The street was lined with casinos, theatres and cinemas. Crowds were strolling up and down, oblivious to the rain. I joined the procession, as my mind ran in circles. It was almost as if I were trying to free myself of a thought that had taken me captive. I read every sign I passed, and every illuminated advertisement. Over and over, I walked the full length of the avenue, which extends for several kilometres. Then I turned right and made for Wittenberg Square. Here I found a group of young men dressed in red boots whose faces were painted like women. They were loitering on the pavement outside a large store named KaDeWe, flashing flirtatious looks at the people passing by.”
When the writer of these lines, a young man from Turkey named Sabahattin Ali, arrived in Berlin between the World Wars, he had no idea that he would write a novel about his unforgettable love with a German lady; and certainly not one that would, many years after his tragic death, become one of the most read and celebrated classics of Turkish literature.
Ali arrived in the German capital in 1928 to be educated as a teacher for the young Turkish Republic, founded only a couple of years before. During the two years that he lived in Berlin and Potsdam, Ali learned German and also began to read Russian classics (in German) for the first time. Like much of the demimonde at this time, he wrote poems, visited cafes and bars, and enjoyed the city’s museums and galleries, all the time missing Turkey and its warm-hearted people.
“…the streets here are cleaner than our homes, everywhere you see triumphal arches but they lack the wrecked walls of our old citadels, and they do not have the bridge that lays down there,” he wrote in one of his poems.
The novel he wrote about the city, Madonna in a Fur Coat is based on his own life experiences. Like Ali, its protagonist Raif Bey is also in his early twenties and is sent to Berlin in the 1920s by his father, but to learn a different craft—that of making soap. But Raif is more interested in the German language and culture than in the work that he was supposed to do in Berlin: “For now I was slowly learning to read properly in German and this gave me great pleasure,“ he says. “I read all of the great Turgenev’s stories in one sitting.”
Raif learns German intensively from a military officer and lives in a guesthouse in Lützow Street that accommodates a mix of international guests. He visits the Alte Nationalgalerie and sees historic masterpieces for the first time in his life, as well as smaller galleries to view the works of younger artists.
During one of these gallery jaunts, on a dark and rainy November day, Raif enters a gallery near …
