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Turkey.” Which reminded me of the notice pinned up over a Berlin cobbler’s desk: “If you
are dissatisfied, tell me—if you are satisfied, tell others.” 41
Efforts to educate the populous were most ambitious to provide skills needed for the twentieth
century and to subdue possible contentions or feuds 42 by keeping religion to the private sphere.
Doctors at the Ministry of Health worked to instill health and hygiene habits with regular checks at
new clinics and hospitals to eradicate malaria and trachoma—between the Seyhan and Ceyhan
rivers—amongst pious peasants who rejected quinine tablets. 43 Linke highlighted their goal to
provide free education to all and “to give all children the same kind of education.” 44 Of a visit to a
school in Malatya, she wrote:
A girl with a long plait, an exception today even in a Turkish town, stood behind the
teacher’s desk. The teacher himself, a middle‐aged man, had taken her seat at the back
and was listening with the children. [...] The method of letting the pupils alternately take
the place of the teacher had once been employed in the most progressive German
schools, but it made me smile to think that my own had never risen to such new‐fangled
experiments and that Asia Minor was more advanced than East Berlin. 45
In sum, Linke met with workers, peasants, state officials, doctors, engineers, teachers, men,
women and children across all socio‐economic strata in Turkey. In her writings, she did her utmost to
present neither an overly glorified nor an unjust account of 1935 Turkey but rather an objective one.
While Linke was congratulatory of Atatürk’s reforms, she clearly realized contradictions were to be
expected as they were amidst a revolutionary process of evolution. The people of Turkey were
working within an extremely difficult interwar period that compromised or even impeded
development. Having read her entire corpus, it more than sufficiently explicates the general problems
many nations faced, albeit Turkey was particularly challenged due to her geo‐political position.
As explicated in my short review of Linke’s life in Germany, her “intent for the common good” had
been silenced in Germany. Journeys to other geographies helped her flourish. Declaring herself a
“sincere friend of the Turks,” 46 Linke was fortunate to experience, share, learn and write through the
inclusion of fellow humanity, thus to heal the self through an act of reciprocity. Linke’s reciprocal gift
to the people of Turkey was a story of her experiences with them that it might be of some use or
purpose one day. As an independent thinker, having little access to institutionalized education replete
with its own prejudices, Linke drew knowledge from the well of lived experiences Erfahren. “Delicate
empiricism” as a reciprocal exchange of “fortunate encounters” taught her a Turkish pattern and a
certain “truth” about their existence and therefore, to question her own. Goethe put forth that such
“...enhancement of our mental powers belongs to a highly evolved age.” 47
In this article, I hope to have briefly introduced Linke’s life and her Turkish story that we may, like
Linke, “unlearn” the “learned” and thus develop a “lively intellect” to “really see” by remaining open
to “fortunate encounters” and by fostering “delicate empiricism.” How fortune Lilo Linke was to have
shared experiences and knowledge with the people of Turkey, Europe and Latin America.
Keywords: delicate empiricism, Erfahren, fortunate encounters
Anita OĞURLU
PhD Candidate, Humanities & Cultural Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London
ogurlu14@gmail.com
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