Observing Kemalist cultural policies in 1936-37, Erich Auerbach wrote from Istanbul to Walter Benjamin: ‘the process is going fantastically and spookily fast: already there is hardly anyone who knows Arabic or Persian, and even Turkish texts of the past century will quickly become incomprehensible.’ Combining ‘a renunciation of all existing Islamic cultural tradition, a fastening onto a fantasy “ur-Turkey”, technical modernisation in the European sense in order to strike the hated and envied Europe with its own weapons’, it offered ‘nationalism in the superlative with the simultaneous destruction of the historic national character’.