Her mother, a European aristocrat, had lost her money at the gaming table and there was nothing left for her daughter to have a higher education. That is why Nermin Suley, as she was still called at the time, decided to travel alone from Budapest to Istanbul at the age of 15, in 1936, on the Orient Express, because she had heard that women were allowed to study in Kemal Ataturk’s young republic. Thus began one of the most extraordinary Turkish academic careers. On Saturday, the politics professor, women and migration researcher Nermin Abadan-Unat, who was born in Vienna on September 18, 1921, will be 100 years old in Istanbul, where she still lives, highly honored and adored by an unmistakable crowd of former students.
When she speaks German, a subtle oscillation of her voice suggests that she came from Vienna, where her parents got married after the First World War. Her father, an Ottoman businessman, traded in raisins, figs and hazelnuts. She is five when the family moves to Istanbul for the first time. One lives sophisticated, speaks French at the table. In her autobiography “Memoirs of a Turkish Academician” she complains about the snobbery of the fine circles in the late Ottoman Empire. The luxury is over when the father suddenly dies and the mother moves to Budapest with Nermin, where she has relatives. There the young people, as long as they can still go to school, experienced teachers who were already infected by National Socialism, ranting about the “Aryan race”. Her mother will never see Nermin Abadan-Unat again after leaving Budapest. She dies during the Second World War and her grave is unknown.
For the 15-year-old, after the daring departure on the Orient Express, a new life begins in a country whose language she first has to learn. She has to earn money from the start because her Turkish relatives hardly support her. But education is free in the new republic, the migrant first studies law, then politics, works as a journalist, becomes a professor, and is the first director of a media university in Ankara.
She is the first in Germany to research the consequences of the guest worker agreement with Turkey
After Germany and Turkey signed the guest worker agreement in 1961, the Turkish government sent the researcher to Germany in 1963. She should find out how her compatriots are doing. She travels from company to company, visits dormitories and works canteens, and discovers that many Turks are malnourished “because they almost only ate home-made macaroni”. The reason: The Turks feared that pork might be served in the canteens. She then suggests placing a Turkish worker next to a cauldron without pork and having it served. It works, and she is amazed at how little knowledge of the other culture is on both sides. When she returns to Ankara, nobody wants to know about her study, which disappears in a drawer. “At that time, Turkey was primarily interested in the foreign exchange that the workers sent home, and the FRG needed workers,” said Nermin Abadan-Unat later when she was supposed to declare her disinterest.
She fared no better when she proposed a seminar on migration as a visiting professor at Munich University in the early 1970s. The topic was found to be academically insignificant and a different one was asked of the Turkish expert. In retrospect, one can only marvel at this ignorance. Nermin Abadan-Unat never stopped researching. At a meeting with the SZ in November 2020 in Istanbul, she said: “You always have to work, you must never give up.” During the conversation, she was sitting in an Istanbul café with tea and biscuits, her little dog Toto on her lap. Dogs were not allowed in the café, but the waiter couldn’t refuse the little white-haired woman. Toto was also the name of the dog of her beloved half-sister Martha, who stayed in Budapest and later took her own life in communist Hungary.
Nermin Abadan-Unat was married twice, each to a politics professor, and she survived both. She raised her son to be a “citizen of the world”, she says, he is an architect in the USA. Now it is two years older than the Turkish Republic, which has been ruled for almost 20 years by a man who repeatedly ignores the autonomy of universities and the judiciary. If you ask the woman, who owes her academic career to Turkey, what she wishes the republic for her 100th birthday in 2023, she says without hesitation: “Democracy, human rights, secularism.”