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Turkish Vergangenheitsbewältigung: The Unbearable Burden of the Past

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Replicating Atonement

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ((PMMS))

Abstract

Kaya sheds light upon Turkish attempts to come to terms with the country’s past and depicts the ways in which these debates have been inspired by similar debates in Germany, known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung. He establishes a positive correlation between the European integration process and the new willingness to cope with the burden of the past in Turkey, with a special focus on the Armenians, Alevis, Kurds, and Circassians. Kaya discusses the state and non-state actors involved in these attempts. He then argues that Turkish Vergangenheitsbewältigung was politically interrupted due to the rise of Euroscepticism in the second half of the 2000s, yet—as the Kurdish example demonstrates—it had developed a momentum that let it continue for some time even in the face of a nationalist backlash.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mischa Gabowitsch and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable remarks and suggestions on the first draft of this article.

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  1. Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Ayhan Kaya

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    Mischa Gabowitsch

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Kaya, A. (2017). Turkish Vergangenheitsbewältigung: The Unbearable Burden of the Past. In: Gabowitsch, M. (eds) Replicating Atonement . Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65027-2_5

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