1

 THE REPUBLIC’S CHILDREN AND THEIR BURDENS IN 1930s AND 1940s
TURKEY:
THE IDEALIZED MIDDLE-CLASS CHILDREN AS THE FUTURE OF THE
NATION AND THE IMAGE OF “POOR” CHILDREN IN
CHILDREN’S PERIODICALS

iii

Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................….1
II. THE NATION-STATE BECOMES VISIBLE TO THE CHILD:
THE IMAGES OF NATIONALISM, THE STATE AND THE REPUBLIC IN THE
MINDS OF CHILD READERS IN 1930s TURKEY...................................................28
The Adoption of the Latin Alphabet: New Words for the Emptied Worlds..…...30
Faruk Gürtunca and Tahsin Demiray’s Periodicals:
Narrators of the Nation-State to the Child Audience.....................................…...36
Who Does the Child Belong To?.....................................................................….44
How the Republic Saved Us...........................................................................…..52
Progress, Discoveries in Far Away Lands and Adventure Stories.................…..67
Children and the Images of Political Socialization During the 1930s...........…...77
The Onset of the Second World War and the Turkish Boy Scouts..............……82
III. THE IDEALIZATION OF REPUBLICAN MIDDLE-CLASS CHILDREN:
READING ABOUT “POOR CHILDREN”…………………………………………...88
The Idealized Roles of Fathers, Mothers and Children.................................…...89
Sons, Daughters, Beautiful and Compassionate Mothers, Mustached and
Modern Fathers in the “Warm Family Home”...............................................…..95
Tomorrow’s Housewives....................................................................................108
Good Manners and Etiquette for Children......................................................…117
And the Summer Comes: Children of Beaches and Camping........................…126
IV. THE ONES BEING WATCHED AND READ ABOUT:
VISIBILITY OF POVERTY IN CHILDREN’S PERIODICALS IN 1940s………133
“Lending a Helping Hand to the Poor” ....................................................……..140
“If He Were a Good and Hardworking Child, He Would Not Have
Remained Poor”. ........................................................………………………....144
Poor but Honest! .................................................................................…….......152
Tugcu’s Poor and Morally Upright Children..............................................…....155
Dogan Kardes’s Shining Children and their “Poor Friends”......……………...166
V. CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................176
BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................................….187
vii
PREFACE
This study is based on a discourse analysis of mainstream children’s
periodicals in the 1930s and early 1940s Turkey. These periodicals are, Çocuk
Sesi/1928-1939 owned by Faruk Gürtunca; Cumhuriyet Çocugu/1938-1939,
Yavrutürk/1936-1942 and Çocuk Haftası/1943-1949 owned by Tahsin Demiray;
Çocuk/1939-1940 owned by Fuad Umay under the auspices of the Children’s
Protection Society and Dogan Kardes/1945-1949 owned by Vedat Nedim Tör under
the auspices of the Yapı Kredi Bank. There are three main chapters in this study
apart from the introduction and conclusion. The second chapter composed of seven
sub-titles, examines the mainstream perceptions of the Republican adults about
children and the public roles they attribute them for the sake of the Turkish nationstate
in the 1930s Turkey. The general aura of this part is shaped around the
dimension of political discourse in the periodicals.
At first, the political reflections of the adoption of the Latin Alphabet and the
emergence of new periodicals in Latin letters in the publishing sector for children are
analyzed. The two main actors in Turkey in this respect were Faruk Gürtunca and
Tahsin Demiray. After describing the significance and the popularity of their
periodicals for urban middle-class children; the roles attributed to children in terms
of the metaphoric relationship between the child, the nation-state and the newly born
Republic are analyzed. The Republican concerns with the ideals of progress,
secularism and disjunction from the Ottoman past are the main subjects through
which the child is portrayed and constructed in the narratives and pictures. The
images of political socialization for children were portrayed around the abstraction of
viii
the single-party regime which was not and could not be an all-encompassing power
but was tried to be offered as such to the imagination of children.
Although Turkey did not attend it, with the onset of the Second World War in
1939, there emerged two new trends in the discourse level of the periodicals due to
the socio-historical context: The first was the new roles reminded to children and
especially boys in war-time contexts and the second was the intensified discourse of
poverty and “poor” children in the narratives and stories as a reflection of worsened
socio-economic conditions in the country. From 1940s on, poverty was much more
visible in the periodicals in addition to the mythicized nation-state and the Republic.
Based on the belief in the significance of the ways through which poverty was
portrayed as just a moral issue devoid of socio-political meaning to the reader
middle-class child audience, the third and fourth chapters focus on an analysis of the
hidden duality between middle-class child readers and “poor” children they read
about in between the lines. This duality is not taken for granted. It is constructed by
a comparative analysis of the mainstream images regarding the daily lives of middleclass
children in their idealized homes and the images regarding the “poor, street,
homeless” children objectified in most of the narratives and stories. The idealized
urban middle-class children of idealized nuclear Republican families living due to
ideals of organic solidarity were the real audience targeted by the periodicals. But the
stories about “poverty, poor families and poor, homeless, working children” proved
that, the conception of “poor” children was outside the Republican vision of the
world as an “otherized” object of pity and mercy or sometimes denigration.
Focusing on this construction, at first the images related to the daily lives of
middle-class children with the definition of idealized manners and roles for each
member of the family will be analyzed in the third chapter. In the second phase, the
ix
intensified narratives regarding poverty since the beginning of the 1940s will be
described in the fourth chapter. Special focus will be given on the narratives and
stories of Kemalettin Tugcu who is perceived as both a figure making poverty more
visible to the reader audience in the context of socio-economically hard 1940s while
continuing the trend of portraying poverty as just a moral question. In this fourth
chapter, the periodical Dogan Kardes will be analyzed as the evidence of the
continuity of the hidden discourse dividing children into those middle-class readers
and those poor objects since 1945, despite the discontinity of one-party aura in those
liberal poltical climax.
In all these chapters, the significance of the child image for the Republic
through the children’s periodicals is analyzed. But while the second chapter draws a
picture of a more unified visioning of Turkish children and their roles for the sake of
the nation-state; the third and fourth chapters shed light on the hidden divisioning of
this unifying discourse and the duality between the conception of the middle-class
“reader audience” and “poor” children as objects read about.
x
To my grandmother
whose existence shaped
nearly all of my childhood memories and images
1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
We have entered such an era that, we know from now on what society,
economy and welfare, population and state mean. In such an era, the
issue of children can only be handled as a child question. And, no, not
as the child question for children in essence; but for the sake of
something, for the sake of an objective; nourishing the child question
for the sake of a distinct question, it is what we believe…We are
realist men. We have only one great aim: Renovation. We are doing
everything for the sake of renovation. The child will be definitely the
object of this principle, too. From then on, the “Turkish Child”, will
establish a dialogue with all the issues of the Renovation and will gain
new meanings and significance in the light of these issues.1
1 “Biz, öyle bir devre girmis bulunuyoruz ki, artık cemiyet nedir, iktısat ve refah nedir, nüfus nedir ve
devlet nedir biliyoruz. Böyle bir devirde, çocuk meselesi ancak bir çocuk davası seklinde ele
alınabilir. Ve, çocuk için çocuk davası olarak degil hayır, bir sey için, bir gaye için, ayrı bir dava için
bir çocuk davası gütmek, iste inandıgımız sey budur. Biz realist adamlarız. Bir tek davamız vardır:
nkılap. Her seyi ondan çıkarıyoruz ve ona gönderiyoruz. Her seyi ona göre istiyor ve ona göre
kararlastırıyoruz. Bu kaideye, çocuk da tabi olacaktır. Ve o zaman, “ Türk Çocugu ” inkılabın bütün
davaları ile birden münasebete girecek ve bu münasebetler bakımından bir mana ve bir ehemmiyet
kazanacaktır.“, Burhan Asaf, “Çocuk Sevgisi” , p. 75-76. (The date and the name of the source are
not clear in the material I have obtained from the personal archives of Cüneyd Okay. But as much as I
can guess by looking at the other writers in the material such as Vedat Nedim, Sükufe Nihal, Sevket
Süreyya, Kazım Nami and Sadri Etem who have signed without their surnames, this material seems to
belong to the years before the adoption of surnames in 1935, probably 1933. It seems to be a special
edition of Kadro about the child question, gathering the writings of the significant intelligentsia of the
Republican establishment. It could be a special edition of 23 April 1933. The titles of the pieces and
the writers are as such: Süküfe Nihal, “Çocuklarımız”, p. 67-69; Dr. Vedat Nedim, “Çocuk nkılabın
Temelidir”, p. 70; Sevket Süreyya, “Sadaka Degil s Birligi”, p. 71-74; Burhan Asaf, “Çocuk
Sevgisi”, p. 75-76; Kazım Nami, “Saglam Çocuk stiyoruz”, p. 77-79. There is just the first page of
“Çocuk Romanları” by Sadri Etem.
2
Childhood is not immune from politics. The children of a specific sociohistorical
context grow up with the contesting political codes and values of that
context to which they were born. The mainstream perceptions of a society about its
children, the values that should be instilled onto them and the expectations of adults
from children in that society, are shaped by hegemonic political reflexes regarding
that context. Departing from here, this study aims to contribute to highlighting some
mainstream perceptions of the Turkish nation-state about its children from 1930s till
the middle of the 1940s in the light of themes from children’s periodicals. Analyzing
the most encountered themes and metaphors of the Republican establishment through
materials directly calling out to children paves the way to distinguishing the specific
meanings and burdens attributed to children in the specific political context of
nation-state formation with their own dilemmas. By this, it is aimed to illuminate
significant images and values that were wished to be instilled onto children’s minds
regarding both the political discourse dimension about public issues and the private
dimension of their daily lives at home, which results in distinguishing a duality
between middle-class children and children of poor families in the periodicals. In the
light of this analysis, it becomes more possible to imagine at least the mainstream
symbols and fictive dualities regarding the idealized metaphors of the nation-state
and family, embedded in children’s minds and memories in the 1930s and early
1940s Turkey.
Always already framed by language and inherited views, children
nonetheless are embodied, sticky, ticklish, intense beings who change
and grow. No wonder they become repositories of societal fears as
well as hopes, regulations as well as dreams.2
2 Martha Minow, "Governing Children, Imagining Childhood," in Governing Childhood, ed. Anne
McGillivary (England: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1997): 250.
3
“Societal fears as well as hopes, regulations as well as dreams”. The way the
child is imagined by the adults of the society in a particular socio-historical context
reflects a lot about the common-sense perceptions in the society of what threat, order
and normality mean and do not mean to them. The universe shaped by the dreams
and hopes of the adults of societies in particular contexts as well as the norms of
threats and regulations, also shapes the perceptions about the identification of
children and paves the way to the emergence of political efforts for finding
mechanisms to materialize the requirements born by these perceptions. As Minow
puts forward rightly, “shifting ideas about children implicate and support particular
views of adults, of natives and foreigners, of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of nature and science
and of order and disorder. Inflected by and in turn shaping images of race, class and
gender, ideas of childhood have served and also themselves been enforced by
expressions of governmental power.”3 It can be said that, the images about social and
political life that are gained during childhood experiences, are shaped by a multidimensional
process which comprises the internalization of many competing
abstractions that the adult agents of the society from family ties to the state has
produced. The last two centuries witnessed this process having been shaped on the
stage opened by the modern nation-state and its specific requirements.
Giddens summarizes the dynamics hidden in the modern nation-state as such:
“Both capitalism and industrialism have decisively influenced the rise of nationstates,
but the nation-state system cannot be reductively explained in terms of their
existence. The modern world has been shaped through the intersection of capitalism,
industrialism and the nation-state system.”4 In this context, heightened surveillance,
capitalistic enterprise, industrial production and the consolidation of centralized
3 Ibid: 256.
4 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987): 4-5.
4
control of the means of violence constitute the four ‘institutional clusterings’ that
Giddens associate with modernity.5
Foucault’s conception of ‘governmentality’ departs from an analysis of the
“analytics of government” and tries to shed light on the modern society in a way that
is very well summarized by Dean, “the mobile, changing and contingent assemblages
of regimes of government and rule have analytic precedence over the resultant
distributions of power and divisions between state and civil society and between
public and private spheres.”6
The debates about the space and practice of power relationships since the
emergence of the modern state is a huge issue in historiography and is beyond the
scope of this study but it should be noted for now that a society’s hegemonic
perceptions regarding its children are interdependent on the space opened by analysis
of power.7 As Dean says, “On the one hand, we govern others and ourselves
according to what we take to be true about who we are, what aspects of our existence
should be worked upon, how, with what means and to what ends. We thus govern
others and ourselves according to various truths about our existence and nature as
human beings. On the other hand, the ways in which we govern and conduct
5 Ibid.
6 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality, Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage Publications,
1999): 26.
7 “For Foucault, modern techniques of discipline (surveillance) produce an effect, a ‘soul’, in those
supervised, trained, corrected, in children at home and at school. This soul is a corporeal prison
which constrains the body by its very constitution. It results from ‘a certain type of power and the
reference of a certain type of knowledge…aimed at the governance of the individual’ In this coercive
individualization, ‘the child is more individualized than the adult’ and the ‘internal search for
childhood’ became the mark of the new disciplinary society’ ”, Anne McGillivray, "Governing
Childhood," in Governing Childhood, ed. Anne McGillivray (Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing
Company, 1997): 3. For a study about the policies of of social welfare towards Turkish children and
women between the years 1923 and 50 in the light of the governmentality paradigm , see Pınar
Öztamur, "Defining a Population: Women and Children in Early Republican Turkey, 1923-50" (MA
Thesis, Bosphorus University, 2004).
5
ourselves give rise to different ways of producing truth.”8 Childhood in this sense
becomes the space where the truths produced in a specific temporality in the modern
society are mainly materialized in the most visible form.
In the context of the modern society, the universal interdependency between
the adult perception of the world and the shaping of the imagination of children have
been based on the ideals of lineer progress. The demographic changes paving the
way to fertility decline and the decrease in infant mortality since the developments in
the 17th century got pace with industrial revolution and the rapid technological
innovations constituted the “zeit-geist” as a lineer path towards the faith in future;
the cyclical understanding of traditional time was tried to be left behind in an
aggressive motion. According to Sealander, this “go-ahead spirit” paving the way to
the strict faith that “change was the future”, could only be materialized on attributing
the child a great role and functionalizing its role. She asks “who better symbolized it
than the young? Why not begin to view childhood as another, quite separate ‘place’”.
As Sharon Stephens says, “the ideological construction of childhood as the
privileged domain of spontaneity, play, freedom, and emotion could only refer to a
society that constrained and drew upon this private domain as the ground for public
culture, discipline, work, constraint and rationality.”9
But we should not think that this symbolization in any case brought with
itself a great change in the actual lives of children. It would be a big mistake of
falling in the trap of the discourse. Childhood was not essentially valued as a separate
space since the emergence of the modern state but it was defined and attached more
importance for the ends of the welfare of the modern states. Since the hegemony of
8 Dean, Governmentality, Power and Rule in Modern Society, 18.
9 Sharon Stephens, "Introduction: Children and the Politics of Culture In "Late Capitalism"," in
Children and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1995): 6.
6
the nation-state was on the stage, the politics of attributing children distinctive roles
than the adults in the society gained new dimensions. Children, who were since the
experience of modernity perceived as the agents of a socially constructed domain as
underlined by Ariés10, became perceived with more complex definitions of race,
state, class and gender. The ethnic definitions in the modern nation-state paved the
way to different dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. This was parallel to the
constitution of memories of hegemonic adult dualities in the minds of the children
about what the faith of the nation was, which groups it included, what the moral good
for the welfare of the nation was and how that would be taught to children.
The metaphoric space of the social context has been a significant channel for
teaching children the intertwined hegemonic social, political and cultural values of
their time and children’s periodicals in this sense have generally been fruitful in
terms of highlighting the hegemonic codes of the times to which they are born.11
When we look at the small amount of the researches made about children’s
periodicals in university departments in Turkey, we see that they are generally under
10 Philippe Ariés, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (London: Jonathan Cape,
1962). Ariés is the most significant name when we are talking about childhood history because he is
the first to approach childhood with a socio-historical perception by which he advocated childhood as
a socially constructed domain in history other than its biological conception. He looked for the roots
of childhood in modern times since the revival of education in the 15th century towards the 18th
century when the modern family and the school together “removed the child from adult society” and
perceived childhood as a separate category from adulthood. Ibid: 412-413. But he was criticized later
by many academicians in terms of his neglect of the evidence that, there was in fact “childhood”
before modern times. The world of children and the adults were not unified as Ariés wrote. Ariés’
approach in these terms can be challenged but his contribution to childhood history in terms of taking
childhood as a social category is still valuable. See for good summaries and criticisms related to
Ariés’ approach; Mine Tan, “Çocukluk: Dün ve Bugün” in Toplumsal Tarihte Çocuk (stanbul: Tarih
Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1994): 11-31 and Colin Heywood, Baba Bana Top At, Batı’da Çocuklugun
Tarihi, (stanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2003): 16-40.
11 See A. Ferhan Oguzkan, “Dünya Çocuk Edebiyatının Ana Çizgileri”, in Çocuk Edebiyatı Yıllıgı
(stanbul: Gökyüzü Yayınları,1987): 15 for a more detailed list and description of first children’s
periodicals published by the aim of educating children in Europe and America the first of which was
published in England in 1788 with the name Juvenile Magazine. See also Elizabeth Fouts, “Literatura
Infantil: A Brief History of Spanish Children’s Literature”, Bookbird, vol. 37, no. 3 (1999): 47-51.
7
the subject of education or literature devoid of historical analysis.12 In fact, this is
related to the scarcity of historical researches about childhood. Childhood was a
neglected area in Turkey till soon. But recently, its significance in social history
started to be more emphasized13 and there emerged alternative historiographic
researches in social history, placing children as the agents of history and looking at
social policies towards children through the phenomena of power, rule, modern state
and society, nation-state and social welfare.14
12 Some of the names of MA theses in this respect are; Ahmet Balcı, “The Evaluation of the Magazine
of Çocuklara Rehber on the Basis of Its Input In Children Education ( Çocuklara Rehber Dergisi’nin
Çocuk Egitimine Katkısı Açısından ncelenmesi), (MA Thesis, Mustafa Kemal University, 2002);
Hüseyin Simsek, “The Study of Children Magazines of Tanzimat and Mutlakiyet Periods In Terms of
Education (Tanzimat ve Mutlakiyet Dönemi Çocuk Dergilerinin Egitim Açısından ncelenmesi),
(Ph.d diss., Ankara University, 2002); Nihat Bayat, “The Functions of Child Magazines ‘Çocuk
Bahçesi, Çocuk Dünyası’ Written In Old Script In Child Education”(Eski Harfli Çocuk Dergilerinin
‘Çocuk Bahçesi, Çocuk Dünyası’ Çocuk Egitimindeki slevleri), (MA Thesis, Dokuz Eylül University,
2002); Halit Yanar, “Examination of Magazines of Bizim Dünya”( Bizim Mecmua Dergilerinin
ncelenmesi), (MA Thesis, Fatih University, 2001); Gülsüm Göktürk, “The Role of Media on Child
Education and the Case Study of Türkiye Çocuk Magazine”( Medyanın Çocuk Egitimindeki Rolü ve
Tükiye Çocuk Dergisi Örnegi),( MA Thesis, stanbul University, 2001); Seyma Yasar, “Mümeyyiz:
One of the First Periodicals”(lk Çocuk Dergilerinden Mümeyyiz), (MA Thesis, Marmara University,
2001); Mehmet Azim, “The Examination of Çocuk Bahçesi Periodicals”(Çocuk Bahçesi Dergilerinin
ncelenmesi),(MA Thesis, Fatih University, 2000); Nihat Kaya, “The Religious Education for
Children At the Periodical Publications of the Presidency of Religious Affairs”(Diyanet sleri
Baskanlıgı Süreli Yayınlarında Çocuklara Din Ögretimi), (MA Thesis, Erciyes University, 1995).
There should be more recent theses, too. But as it is seen, most of these researches are approaching the
subject from the perspective of education and literature.
13 One of the most reliable sources about children’s periodicals studied by a historical perspective in
Turkey is Cüneyd Okay’s “Children’s Periodicals Written in Old Script” (Eski Harfli Çocuk
Dergileri), (stanbul: Kitabevi, 1999). See also his recent article suggesting new directions to
encourage studies about childhood and children’s periodicals in Turkey: Cüneyd Okay, “Türkiye’de
Çocuk Tarihi: Tespitler, Öneriler”, Kebikeç, no. 19 (stanbul: 2005): 121-127. Another recent article
belongs to Bekir Onur who approaches the delay in childhood studies in Turkey from the perspective
that, childhood studies came to Turkey late as the Turkish modernization came late. Bekir Onur,
“Çocuklugun Dünü ve Bugünü”, Kebikeç, no. 19 (stanbul: 2005): 99-112. This perspective
contributes to the hegemony of modernization paradigm and “time-lag” of nations with respect to the
experience of modernization on a lineer line. But is fact there is no linearity and nobody is late in
modernization. Taking modernization as granted paves the way to continuing the Eurocentric
abstractions of history such as modernization and “late modernization”. See Harry D. Harootunian.
"All the Names of History." In Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar
Japan, xxxii, 440. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
14 See for example Özgür Sevgi Göral, The Child Question and Juvenile Delinquency During the
Early Republican Era, (MA Thesis, Bogaziçi University: 2003), Pınar Öztamur, Defining A
Population: Women and Children in Early Republican Turkey, (MA Thesis, Bogaziçi University:
2004), Yigit Akın, Not just a Game: Sports and Physical Education in the Early Republican Turkey
(MA Thesis, Bogaziçi University: 2003) and Günver Günes, “Cumhuriyet’in lk Yıllarında Ödemis’in
Kimsesiz ve Yoksul Çocukları: Ödemis Himaye-I Etfal Cemiyeti’nin Faaliyetleri”, Kebikeç, no. 19
(stanbul: 2005): 141-155.
8
Children’s periodicals in Turkey had their roots in the Ottoman Era. In
“Children’s Periodicals Written in Old Script” (Eski Harfli Çocuk Dergileri)15
Cüneyd Okay gives descriptive information about most of the children’s periodicals.
Some of the names from the list of most popular children’s periodicals in the
Ottoman Era as gathered by Okay are Mümeyyiz (1869), Hazine-i Etfal (1873),
Çocuklara Kıraat (1881), Çocuklara Talim (1887), Çocuk Bahçesi (1905), Çocuk
Dünyası (1913-1918), Çocuk Yurdu (1913), Türk Çocugu (1913), Hür Çocuk (1918)
and Sevimli Mecmua (1925). Their subjects were mainly based both on translated and
adapted European literary texts for children and traditional stories of popular culture,
such as Dede Korkut, Ferhat ile Sirin, Köroglu, Karagöz and Nasreddin Hoca.16 Then
it seems the children’s periodicals became one of the significant spaces where the
interaction and juxtaposition of westernization and traditionalism since the Tanzimat
Era in social arena was reflected.
After the establishment of the Republic and the adoption of the Latin
alphabet, a great deal of children’s periodicals with Latin letters started to be
published. This study aims to contribute to highlighting some levels of the political
perceptions about the nation-state and Republicanism on the same level in six of
these mainstream childrens’ periodicals in Turkey in the 1930s and 40s. It tries to do
this by shedding light on the ways where essentialized, culturalist definitions and
metaphors of the newly established nation-state and the Republic targeted the
15 Cüneyd Okay, “Children’s Periodicals Written in Old Script”. Ibid.
16 According to Seyma Gençel, Sevimli Mecmua published by Zekeriya Sertel twice a week is a
different one among the other didactic periodicals of the day. Due to this, Sevimli Mecmua is the one
that became very influential in determining the boundary of the definition of what a children's
periodical is as there wasn't any didactic writings and advices in the periodical but more entertainment
issues such as games, competitions, photographs, caricatures, and biographis of important scientists
and heroes. Seyma Gençel, "Çocuk Dergileri," in Türkiye'de Dergiler-Ansiklopediler (1849-1984)
(stanbul: Gelisim, 1984): 188.
9
imagination of a certain type of an ideal middle-class child while consuming and
otherizing the vagrant child on the street for the idealization of this middle-class
child and its home. In this respect, the envisioned duality between the middle-class
identity and “poor” identity of children in this study, is not taken for granted but is
constructed as a flexible duality in the light of the images and metaphors of
periodicals. Middle-class children and poor children are not regarded as belonging to
fixed, homogeneous, unified and stable classes. In fact, there was not such a
definition of “class” in the 1930s and 1940s Turkey as it was understood in the sense
of the 1960s. The constructed duality between these two groups of children is
presented only through the universe of symbols and images from the periodicals.
Certainly it is beyond the scope of this thesis to analyze the social and
cultural experiences of children from all social spheres of society in terms of the
relationship between the child, the family and the state in the period under discussion
which presents a huge arena waiting for researchers. This thesis is limited to the
metaphors of nationalism and Republican modernization in Turkey in the 1930s and
1940s’ expressed in the children’s periodicals, which targeted the child and tried to
mobilize the “childish” mind as a special agent and attributed to the child a great role
as a starting point and as a mediator for the progress of the Turkish nation towards
the future. The ideals of this perception were based mostly on the rearing of “today”
for the fruitfulness of “tomorrow” by rejecting the “past”. The ahistorical discourse
of disjunction from the past in favour of an illusory tomorrow targeted the
imagination of the child to announce the dawn of the “present” of the new and
“unique” Turkish Republic and its higly donated signs and metaphors both in the
perceptions regarding the nation-state and the ideal child of the ideal home. The child
would be the store, carrier and transmitter of these values in favour of the future. The
10
political hegemony would continue to focus on the consciousness of the child,
attempts continued to shape it by the modernist, progressive and developmentalist
values of the day whose norms were being shaped by the Republican elite. The child
was an agent which could at any time go on a wrong path, it could be deviant; so that
it had to be governed by different strategies by the adults. It had to be educated and
the children’s periodicals would play great roles in this education process.
This study focuses on the political discourse area of nation-state building that
mainly the six mainstream periodicals draw. These are; Çocuk Sesi (The Voice of the
Child/1928-1939) published by its owner M. Faruk Gürtunca under the auspices of
Ülkü Publishing House in stanbul between the years 1928-1939; Yavrutürk (The
Little Turkish Child/1936-1942), Cumhuriyet Çocugu (The Child of the
Republic/1938-1939) and Çocuk Haftası (The Week of the Child/1943-1949)
published by their owner Tahsin Demiray under the auspices of Türkiye Publishing
House in Cagaloglu between the years mentioned in stanbul; Çocuk (The
Child/1939-1940) published by Dr Fuad Umay under the auspices of the Children’s
Protection Society between 1936 and 1948 in Ankara and Dogan Kardes (Brother
Dogan/1945-1949) published by Vedat Nedim Tör under the auspices of the Yapı
Kredi Bank in stanbul between 1945 and 1978.17 Dogan Kardes was closed down in
1978 because of a strike in the political climax of the 1970s but was bought by The
Publications of Yapı Kredi again in 1988 and was published till 1993. But here, just
its years between 1945-49 are included.
But this study is not just limited to an analysis of political discourses towards
children regarding the public space of the nation-state. It also seeks to shed light on
the private space of Republican children at home. The common-sense values and
17 The more detailed information regarding the periodicals under consideration is given in the second
chapter.
11
moral codes surrounding the ideal middle-class child and its home are analyzed in
the light of the childrens’ stories, advices of Republican elite to children as written in
some pieces, letters and some other narratives in the periodicals which give us clues
about the norms of identifying Republican normality, morality and order in the
context of the 1930s and 1940s. This analysis is tried to be made by a thematic
approach rather than a chrolonological one; but on the surface the more distinct
periods shaped by the statism and great power of one-party regime in the 1930s, the
conditions of the onset of the Second World War between 1939 and 1945 and the
transformation of World Order by the end of the War in 1945 and its reflections in
Turkey are worked into the themes of the chapters.
The second chapter tries to shed light on the mainstream metaphors of the
Republic and the nation-state presented to the imagination of children in the 1930s’
periodicals when statism and the power of one-party were hegemonic and the
expectations from the child of the Republic were shaped around the metaphors
equating the child with the nation. The periodicals carried in themselves mainly the
images of nationalism, progress, modernization, disjunction from the past, secularism
and main tools of political socialization for children shaped around the writings
about one-party regime.
The ways through which the ideal and virtuous middle-class child of a truly
Republican nuclear family with its gendered terms in the stories is represented from
the 1930s towards 1940s, are analyzed in the third chapter. The more intensive
visibility of “poor children” on the other face of the coin since the intensification of
poverty in the 1940s with the Second World War conditions in Turkey is the issue of
the fourth chapter. The fourth chapter focuses on how sometimes “poor” and
“virtuous” and sometimes “poor” and “vagrant” child in the stories and poems is
12
“otherized” by the “middle-class” eyes, in terms of advocating the values and morals
of the nation-state identified in the moral space. It means, morality becomes
perceived as the basis of all social problems in the pieces written for children.
The general path is such: the virtuous middle-class child educated with the
values of nation-state formation and attends school regularly, studies to his lessons
on time, listens to his compassionate mother guiding him from behind, obeys to his
father “who wants his son’s/daughter’s best to make from him/her a great and dutiful
citizen for the virtous Turkish Republic”, is the subject who becomes a model to the
objectified poor vagrant child on the street who generally is characterized as arriving
at self-realization and is saved from the street or becomes rich in the end only with
good morals. If the child that has to live in the street works hard, becomes a good,
obedient child and arrives at the reason of the Republican adults, than the stories
allow the child to be rich or happy at the end, otherwise if he does not try to be a
morally upright person; he will remain as a poor vagrant and when he grew up, it
would be his own fault, not a social problem to be handled politically. It is argued
here that, the social inequalities and poverty are taken just as problems of morality
rather than as issues of political value where the stories that the children read are full
of symbolic idealization of this middle-class child of the Republican family. From
the same paradigm, it is those little heroes that are sanctified by their poverty who
studied hard, helped his/her friends, worked while going to school and always tried
to be a good and obedient child that are pictured as saving himself/herself from
poverty or from the unhappiness of poverty at the end by his/her good morals. This is
a very typical success story written for children and included in the periodicals from
the end of the 1930s and into the 1940s.
13
The children’s periodicals in Turkey are a production of the socio-historical
reality to which they were born, shaped and were shaped by. These cultural tools did
not float on the air as autonomous things; they carried specific meanings within their
context. Their significance in my analysis comes from their positions as being a
genre of childhood, which I take as a space of hegemony in terms of being home to
the competing political discourses of the time. The hegemonic moral codes of the
periods represented in the periodicals are sometimes subjects of direct manipulation,
sometimes signs of “the political unconscious.”18 But they construct a memory in
children of the time by the internalization, reflection and dissemination of the
hegemonic codes of the time and power relationships in the public space of the social
realm that is materialized institutionally at the state and is made visible for children’s
eyes in terms of the pieces they read about the exaggerated nation-state formation. In
this context, the private space of the family also becomes a space of interference for
the state. These are not two separate compartments, but shape and are shaped by each
other, paving the way for broader questions regarding the symbols of the morality of
the political power(s) both outside and inside the home. The space, the value and the
burden the child has in the society as the future of the nation-state is intertwined with
the space, the value and the burden the child is attributed at home.
The interaction of childhood as a historical, social and cultural category, the
representations in children’s periodicals as a genre and the dominant and deviant
values of political morals together result in a situation well underlined by Zipes with
regard to fairy tales from which we can arrive at an association with our subject of
discourse analysis of the periodicals: “Fairy tales and children’s literature were
written with the purpose of socializing children to meet definite normative
18 Quoted from the terms of Frederic Jameson by Jack Zipes, "Fairy-Tale Discourse: Towards a Social
History of the Genre," in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (New York: Routledge, 1991): 2.
14
expectations at home and in the public sphere. The behavioural standards were
expressly codified in books on manners and civility. This means that the individual
symbolic act of writing the literary fairy tale expressed a certain level of social
consciousness and conscience which were related to the standard mode of
socialization at that time”19 In this respect, children’s periodicals in a particular era
and context should be admitted as carriers of the socio-economic, cultural and
political codes of competing discourses in the public space which is the home to
different or sometimes similar patterns of social norms. In the experience of the
1930s and 40s until the appearance of Dogan Kardes in 1945 at the end of the
Second World War under the auspices of a great investor Kazım Taskent, it is more
possible to talk about the similarity of the political discourse in the periodicals Çocuk
Sesi, Cumhuriyet Çocugu, Yavrutürk and Çocuk Haftası as it makes itself visible in
the hands of the publisher Republican teachers Faruk Gürtunca and Tahsin Demiray
feeling so much responsibility for the progressivist, statist and nationalist aims of the
Turkish nation-state. They felt responsible for educating the children of the
uneducated masses and never let the newly shining light of the Turkish nation
extinguish. But the emergence of Dogan Kardes by a great investor in 1945 marks
the beginning of a new liberal-democratic understanding in contrast to the previous
periodicals of Gürtunca and Demiray which were published under the shadow of the
single-party regime.20
19 Ibid: 9.
20 This does not mean that the homogenizing and totalizing analysis of “single-party” and “multiparty”
periods are valid and the transition to multi-party period transformed the society in all spheres.
But what happened was the emergence of a new center of a competing discourse about the role of the
child which was attributed more significance in its essential value more than its significance for the
cultural projects of the nation-state. Dogan Kardes found for itself a proper place in the context of the
end of the Second World War that paved the way to increasing discourses about democratization. The
private initiative of Kazım Taskent was a new and richer one in terms of pieces of entertainment in
contrast to the previous pieces in Gürtunca’s and Demiray’s periodicals published in the aura of the
great mobilization for the nation-state.
15
We should remember that childhood is a stage of personal history other than
being a category of broader socio-historical reality. It is our memory, in fact. When
we look back at our childhood, we see that our images related to the meaning of the
world today were formed by our childhood experiences. The transformations in the
socio-historical contexts that we try to deconstruct now have already been encoded in
our minds through our childhood images, which are embedded in both our personal
and social standings. As Stephani Woodson very rightly puts forward, unlike
categories of race, culture, or gender, all individuals have shared in the temporality
of childhood and it is this point where she finds childhood as positioned as a location
to which everyone has ties-emotional, foundational, physical-memories and
thoughts.21 Her conceptualization of “cultural geography” with regard to children
seems to be a useful lense of analysis: According to Woodson, “child space is a
geography of developmental time phenomenologically performed on and in the
material and mental selves of the children…and childhood exists as a space in which
culture, identity and significance are repeatedly and overtly stamped onto children in
order to recover them from, or to reiterate, their otherness. The performative
geography of childhood then looks not only at material culture, but also at issues of
containment, and cultural production and replication-combining the material and the
symbolic.” From these words it is reasonable to accept the cultural geography of
childhood as a terrain of control onto which a society’s internal controls function to
funnel the child into approved channels of “normal” existence.22 These comments
should take us to the point at which these channels of “normal” existence are
embedded in both the hegemonic ideological positions of broader power centers
21 Stephani Etheridge Woodson, "Mapping the Cultural Geography of Childhood or, Performing
Monstrous Children," Journal of American Culture Winter 1999, no. 22 (1999): 32.
22 Ibid.
16
rooted in the state and the hegemonic class norms where class should be perceived as
a cultural phenomenon other than its socio-economic base shaping all of life where
our personal history and social standing interact and shape our perceptions of the
world.
This “normalization” effort does not have to be a completely conscious act; I
have mentioned about the agency of the “political unconscious” before. This is why
many have turned their faces to the allegorical space of fables, stories, and other texts
in children’s literature. It is true also in light of literature on governmentality that,
from the “primary socialization agent” family to the state agency; “adults and social
institutions are invested in ascribing meaning onto and into childhood in order to
maintain social order, and the socialization of children negotiates not only behaviour
patterns, but also identity formation.”23 The memory of the child is shaped by the
common-sense perceptions of the day which will also shape his character and
position in the social realm. The norms of “normal” behaviour flow unconsciously
from the cultural pieces to the imagination of the child and the “normal” is identified
in a complex set of variables, dichotomies and abstractions reducing the social and
cultural reality to crude categorizations (the most common dichotomy being the good
and the bad) in the context of the periodicals, which are both universal and specific
due to the broader socio-historical context.
What is the relationship of this process to the reading practices of children?
Here comes the issue of the broader implications of symbolic productions in the
memories of children. As Tony Watkins writes “the stories we tell our children, the
narratives we give them to make sense of cultural experience, constitute a kind of
mapping, maps of meaning that enable our children to make sense of the world. They
23 Ibid.
17
contribute to children’s sense of identity, an identity that is simultaneously personal
and social: narratives, we might say, shape the way children find a ‘home’ in the
world.”24 Finding a home in the world is not something temporary. It is what in fact
feeds a child’s memory with the codes of the “home”. It means, the “home” the child
finds in this world in a specific socio-historical reality is a terrain of competing
metaphors whose between-the-lines carries the codes of the normalizing,
regularizing, socializing and categorizing power codes of the time.
But, here again, surfaces a question: Does the child have no agency in this
process? Of course, the child has his/her agency as a subject of history. We should
pay attention to the very important words of Woodson, who adds a valuable
comment to her further analysis regarding the cultural geography of childhood as
being a space of “normalizing control”. She renders the agency of a child as a subject
in this process and says that, although cultures literally and figuratively depend upon
the “successful” socialization of their children in order to promote order and stability
in the environment (due to the dominant criteria of the context; my emphasis), a
child’s agency can threaten this process. “The cultural geography of childhood, does
not exist as an empty space awaiting the implamantation of standardized thoughts,
emotions, behaviours, or adherence to schedules.”25 It is because of the truth of this
analysis that a child’s memory is not an inevitable and unalterable microchip of the
values and morals of the times to which it is born; the agency of children implies
action in their imagination and the free interpretation of symbols that can later be a
24 Tony Watkins, "Cultural Studies, New Historicism and Children's Literature," in Literature for
Children: Contemporary Criticism, ed. Peter Hunt (New York: Routledge, 1992): 183.
25 Woodson, "Mapping the Cultural Geography of Childhood or, Performing Monstrous Children," 34.
18
space of transformation and conscious resistance.26 But again, the problem is that,
this freedom is materialized only when the child grows up. What emerges then
becomes the resistance of one in his adolescence to his own childhood hegemonized
by the adult perceptions when he was a child; not an active resistance of a child to
the adult perceptions shaping the hegemonic codes of the time.
A valuable analysis regarding the subjectivity of children in the social reality
has been made by Ashis Nandy with regard to his conception of the “ideology of
adulthood.”27 What makes his position political comes from his critique of the
hegemony of Western civilization, which he accuses of fetishizing development,
growth, progress, technology, maturity, competition and performance symbolized in
the “metaphor of childhood as a major justification of all exploitation.”28 According
to Nandy, the hegemony of the ideals of Western civilization is sustained by the
modern exploitation tools of the ideology of adulthood to the rest of the world: “To
the extent adulthood itself is valued as a symbol of completeness and as an end-
26 Sharon Stephens puts the argument simply and clearly as such: "As representatives of the contested
future and subjects of cultural policies, children stand at the crossroads of divergent cultural projects.
Their minds and bodies are at stake in debates about the transmission of fundamental cultural values
in the schools. The very nature of their senses, language, social networks, worldviews, and material
futures are at stake in debates about ethnic purity, national identity, minority self-expression, and selfrule.
In recent years, researchers have "discovered" that children are not empty vessels, waiting to be
filled with adult values, but rather active, creative participants in society (see Gullestad 1991). The
phrase "children's own culture" is meant to foreground children's agency, as well as to emphasize the
importance of other children in the process of socialization" But in fact it must be emphasized that, the
active and participant stance of children in the society as agents of history does not mean an active
political stance; it means the child is an agent who is not just being shaped by the adult world but
shapes the political perceptions in his surrounding by its potential to be perceived as an hope or threat
in the society.” Stephens, "Introduction: Children and the Politics of Culture In "Late Capitalism.", 6.
For example, in a good article of South African writer Njabulo Ndebele, children’s culture is
perceived as the most significant and only tool by which South African National Reconstruction can
be managed. “The recovery of childhood is something inextricably bound with the reconstruction of
society. It will be the result of that reconstruction, rather than the cause of it”, Njabulo Ndebele,
“Recovering Childhood: Children in South African National Reconstruction” In Children and the
Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995): 332. What is
required according to Ndebele is their energy, fearlessness and questioning attitude.
27 Ashis Nandy, "Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood," in Traditions,
Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
28 Ibid: 59.
19
product of growth or development, childhood is seen as an imperfect transitional
state on the way to adulthood, normality, full socialization and humanness. This is
the theory of progress as applied to the individual life-cycle. The result is the
frequent use of childhood as a design of cultural and political immaturity or, it comes
to the same thing, inferiority.”29
Nandy’s main agenda is based not on a direct critique of childhood. He uses
the metaphor of childhood to make a criticism of Western ideals of humanity,
progress and development which, according to him, legitimize the process of
colonization both in the eyes of the colonizer and the colonized.30 But although there
are problems with his writings, the most important of which is his misconception of a
unified Western identity, his accounts regarding “the ideology of adulthood” opens
the space to further criticism of the modern power relationships of the child, the
family and the society which tries to save the child from his/her attributed
inferiority.31 By admitting that the repression of children in the name of socialization
29 Ibid: 57.
30 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemey: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1983). In this book, he has many interesting arguments regarding the
experience of India under the colonization process of Britain.
31 The most valuable contribution of Nandy comes from his critique of modern power relationships
which I think make Nandy and Foucault come closer even if they come from different traditions of
social critique: Nandy says "Mankind has progressed towards better treatment of children and that
modern societies have been kinder to children than traditional societies. Such an argument, however,
ignores the qualitative changes in human oppression brought about by new, impersonal, centralizing
and uniformizing forces released by the modern state system, technology and, more recently, by a
social consciousness dominated by mass communications…Unlike the traditional or savage oppressor,
the modern oppressor is empty within". When Foucault makes an analysis of power since the
seventeenth century in terms of the disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population
constituting the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed; he focuses
on the modern identification of power as against the traditional conception of power as embedded in
the central sovereign of traditional society and says: " The setting up, in the course of the classical
age, of this great bipolar technology-anatomic and biological, individualizing and specifying, directed
toward the performances of the body, with attention to the processes of life-characterized a power
whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through.(to
regularize, normalize, educate the child due to the needs of the society; my emphasis) The old power
of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of
bodies and the calculated management of life" Michel Foucault, "Right of Death and Power over
Life," in The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990): 261-62.
20
and education was the basic model of all legitimate modern repression, exactly as the
ideology of adulthood- including the glorification of work, performance and
productivity as normal and mature- was the prototypical theory of progress designed
to co-opt on behalf of the oppressors the visions of the future of their victims; in fact,
he tries to save the colonized Indian mind from the hegemony of Western civilization
by attributing the colonized-the so called “child”-an agency.
Other than his dealing with the ideological construction of childhood,
Nandy’s work is significant also in another respect of highlighting the
interdependency of the metaphorical and material phenomena which carries great
importance for this study. Social reality is a multi-dimensional space that can be
handled only with perspectives which feed themselves with a broad spectrum of
material and metaphorical phenomena together that puts forward the requirement of a
look at a particular socio-historical reality not just as it seems on the surface, but also
of an analysis of how it is made known, perceived, reconstructed and so reshaped
culturally. Looking from this perspective, what is the most important thing to be
aware of while trying to make an historical analysis should be the inevitable link
between these material and metaphorical phenomena which makes it more possible
to avoid reductionist approaches to the issue at hand and to read what is between-thelines
of the issue.
What is between the lines of the historical realities? Is every ‘between-theline’
a reflection of socio-political reality that is made visible in textualities or is it
paranoia to read the between-the-lines instead of the reality experienced as it seems
on the surface? The answers to both questions should be ‘no’ because the symbolic
representation of the historical event and its existence as a political stance among the
actors of the historical context must be analysed by trying to make a balance of their
21
interaction. Lynn Hunt writes that, “all practices, whether economic or cultural,
depend on the representations individuals use to make sense of their world.”32
Although I agree with this, I would add that, although these representations have the
potential to reconstruct historical reality, they do not do this in a contained and
isolated space. What constructs historical experience, “whether economic or
cultural”, can not be understood just by looking at the representation. If the
deciphering of meaning, rather than the inference of causal laws of explanation, is
taken to be the central task of cultural history, as Hunt says, then cultural history
carries its own danger of over-textualization. The text should not be perceived just as
a mirror; it is a tool of analysis without which it is not meaningful to question
historical experience. What makes historical experience a lived phenomenon is
embedded in the ways it is perceived by different agents of the society.
Causal explanations and meaning should not be perceived as separate
compartments of historical analysis. This is what makes Chartier’s criticism
meaningful, as quoted by Hunt: “Chartier insists that historians of culture must not
replace a reductive theory of culture as reflective of social reality with an equally
reductive assumption that rituals and other forms of symbolic action simply express a
central, coherent, communal meaning. Nor must they forget that the texts they work
with affect the reader in varying and individual ways. Documents describing past
symbolic actions are not innocent, transparent texts; they were written by authors
with various intentions and strategies, and historians of culture must devise their own
strategies for reading them.”33
32 Lynn Hunt, "Introduction: History, Culture, and Text," in The New Cultural History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989): 19.
33 Ibid: 14.
22
In this case we should take into account the criticisms of Biernacki towards
cultural history writing in terms of “cultural historians’ sardonic self-reflection on the
textual construction of both social life and historical explanation that creates a
metaphysical bond between life and its explication.”34 Although I find his attack on
cultural history rigid and paranoid when he says that the new cultural history tries to
prolong the life of social history because it needs a counterposition against which its
own terms might appear more securely antifoundational, the questions he asks in an
interrogation of cultural history writing are very important: Whether, when, and how
particular cultural elements make a distinguishable difference of their own for
historical outcomes, how the symbols are produced and validated, of whether and
how the meanings they orchestrate represent a cause of their emergence and
survival.35 The question phrase “whether” carries great importance for an historical
analysis in terms of its rendering the possibility that the text is not necessarily a
reflection of the social reality of the context, but it certainly means something in that
specificity, at least a contribution to the reconstruction of the codes of the time, if not
in the dominant textuality, that will succeed or will be resisted by the next
generations, that it will become ‘history’ in fact.
So, the cultural historian studying the metaphorical space of cultural
productions and texts has to treat historical experience not just in allegorical terms,
but by a perspective sensitive to the inseparatedness of social/historical from the
metaphorical where these two levels of analysis are perceived in the same manner, in
Köksal’s words. According to this perspective, what is significant in a text is not its
34 Richard Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Beyond the Cultural
Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
35 Ibid: 68-72.
23
explanation of the historical reality as a direct reflection, but its position in that
complexity of the historical context in terms of the extent to which the text fits this
complexity or stands in somewhere else.36
Metaphors are the tools that we need to interrogate both our individual and
social historical experiences. Simply, we arrive at a self-realization of our individual
and social being by the help of the metaphors which have the power to question the
dynamics of historical experience both as materially lived and “perceived”
phenomena. When Franco Moretti puts the bourgeois civilization into questioning, it
is no coincidence that he uses the literary metaphors of Frankenstein and Dracula, the
monster (the disfigured wretch/the worker) and the vampire (the ruthless
proprietor/capital- to question this civilization because he believes that “the literature
of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society.”37 That is the way he
chooses to handle the cultural expressions of bourgeois civilization and it is
understandable as a strategy to cope with an analysis of socio-historical reality. The
socio-historical and complex experiences of bourgeois civilization are made visible
by the literary terms which highlight the agency of cultural interpretation in an
interrogation of the world.
To what extent is social reality reflected in the competing discourses of a
particular context? Is there a direct or indirect relationship between the social reality
and the symbolic existence of the discourses which are constructed in that particular
context of social reality? Is cultural production necessarily shaped by the social
reality of the context or does it have an ontology in itself that shapes the social
36 Duygu Köksal, "Sosyal Bilimlerin Kıyısında Edebiyat," in Sosyal Bilimleri Yeniden Düsünmek
(stanbul: Metis, 2001): 225.
37 Franco Moretti, "Dialectic of Fear," in Signs Taken for Wonders : Essays in the Sociology of
Literary Forms (London ; New York: Verso, 1988): 83.
24
reality? William Sewell’s answer to these questions alike seem fruitful if one wants
to interrogate the dynamics of a possible balance to be constructed on a nonreductionist
space of interaction between the “cultural”, the “social” and the
“political” which can never be separate compartments of historical reality. After
making a distinction between the concept of culture-as-a-system of symbols and
meanings and the concept of culture-as-practice; he declares his own position to be
on the side of culture-as-practice which denies the abstraction of the meaningful
aspect of human action from the flow of concrete interactions and objects to a
portrayal of culture as logical, coherent, shared, uniform and static and having its
own ontology.38 Sewell finds the recent turn to a concept of culture-as-practice in
theorotical writing in the 1980s fruitful as it is this approach that renders “the
contradictoriness and malleability of cultural meanings” and their flexibility due to
the mechanisms by which meanings are transformed.39 Are these mechanisms only
cultural? No, of course not, because we are dealing with history, which in fact talks
for itself by the interaction of a multitude of socio-economical, cultural and political
elements that contain, shape and are transformed by each other’s agents.40
Departing from these debates, what can be said for the relationship of
children’s periodicals in the 1930s and 1940s particular and local context of Turkey
becomes a matter of a multi-dimensional analysis which constitutes the basic
limitation of this study. This study can not give clues about children’s experiences
38 William H. Sewell, "The Concept(S) of Culture," in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in
the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999): 43-44.
39 Ibid: 45.
40 It is because of this that; the debates on class in historiography fortunately started to take into
account the symbols of the experiences of the working class by the valuable contribution of E.P.
Thompson which could not be understood both apart from the socio-economic context and the cultural
space of the political implications of the material system and the meanings that they have attributed to
this system which is itself a political act in the form of a cultural activity.
25
equally in the socio-economic, cultural and political spaces which are not separate
compartments in fact. But this is a huge arena as highlighted above and although the
author of this study is very much aware that discourse analysis of certain cultural
pieces in a limited arena carries in itself the dangers of over-textualization, making
homogenizing and totalizing abstractions; at least it is very significant to know that
the most popular children’s periodicals of the time included in this study put forward
significant clues to wander in the mainstream maps of meaning targeted in the
children’s minds in the years mentioned. As this study focuses on a periodical
analysis in its methodology, it should be acknowledged that it focuses on what the
periodicals stand for in the context of the 1930s and 1940s Turkey, not what the
1930s and 1940s stand for in terms of the interaction of socio-economic, cultural and
metaphorical experiences, which is beyond the scope of this study.
Although the periods that are under examination in this study are never
homogeneous in the developments in the political, cultural and social arenas in social
reality which can not be immune from the perceptions of the actors in that historical
specificity, this study has had to pay more attention to the voice of the Republican
elite perceptions-especially publisher and writer teachers of the time- and their
reflection in the home than to the real voice of the objectified children in the
periodicals because of the metaphors in the periodicals which carried me to the
deciphering of the political power(s) that was institutionalized both in the elite
discourse of nationalism and in the Republican values in the family.
But in fact this is a general problem for most of the childhood studies where
the real voice of children is impossible to be heard. Where can the real voice of
children be followed even when subaltern studies of adultsis doubtful about its adult
voices in the archives? What Minow offers is a valuable and morally upright position
26
in this context when she answers the question that how we can get hold of children’s
sentiments-and do we as adults want to do so: “Perhaps we can at most hope to denaturalize
our thoughts about children, to make them seem contingent on our past
and our desires. Becoming more self-conscious about the assumptions we take for
granted would include learning to examine the structures of our categories, what we
suppress with them, how we carve dichotomies or sharp lines where perhaps there
are only interconnections.”41 Although it is impossible for the periodicals to shed
light on a broad social arena of the child question in the social context of the 1930s
and 1940s Turkey in terms of education, welfare, citizenship, poverty, charity etc., at
least the analysis of children’s periodicals chosen in this study tries to make a
contribution to carving the dichotomies in the discourse level of the Republican elite
targeting the imagination of children in the cultural context of the newly established
nation-state.
Before analyzing these periodicals, an important point regarding the
significance of children’s periodicals in highlighting the political perceptions of the
time must be remembered: Children’s periodicals are significant for an historical
analysis in terms of their unique value as sources of the most visible information
regarding the period being addressed. In other words, as these periodicals address
children, for whom they had to develop a naïve, simple and visual language rather
than textuality, the ideological clues involved had to be expressed in the simplest and
most direct way. This paved the way for the caricaturization of the complex debates
of the adults regarding the competing discourses about the route of the new nationstate
about such topics as progress, development, modernization, secularization and
the disjunction with the past and the roots of the nation in Central Asia. The most
41 Minow, "Governing Children, Imagining Childhood", 258.
27
complex debate was simplicized in a children’s periodical through the adoption of
the language of the child. And it is usually that moment in the process of knowledge
when everything is brightened: the words become simpler, cruder and closer to the
essence of the subject. Every issue and position which is expressed in simpler words
and a spatial visualization rather than the flexible basis of round words, gives many
more clues to us regarding the inner motivation of the subject. The more the issue
becomes caricaturized, the more its nature and dilemmas are revealed. This is why
children’s periodicals are unique and great sources for an historical analysis as they
put in front of us the best forms of knowledge regarding both the time addressed and
their own position in this particularity. They have the function to hide in themselves
the crudest clues of the most complex issues regarding the Republic in the 1930s and
1940s. The between-lines of the children’s stories, pictures and photographs, at times
take us to the historical position of the debates maybe more than the rest of the
complex debates of adult thinkers. It is because of this that the six children’s
periodicals between the 1930s and 1940s included in this study, are valuable in terms
of highlighting some aspects of the mainstream discourses about the Republic if not
all.
28
CHAPTER II
THE NATION-STATE BECOMES VISIBLE TO THE CHILD:
THE IMAGES OF NATIONALISM, THE STATE AND THE REPUBLIC IN THE
MINDS OF CHILD READERS IN 1930s TURKEY
The two centuries of heritage of modernity with its main premise of control
and regulation of the masses in a specific territoriality targeting their “normal”ity and
functionality would pave the way for another story in the Turkish case in a just
arrived nation-state. The experience of Ottoman modernity with westernization,
enlightenment and centralization efforts since the nineteenth century had been a great
link towards the Republic but the Republican elites refused to be a part of a
continuation and constructed their ideology on a discourse of disjunction with the
past. Nationalism had to rise on a background of hatred from multi-ethnicity, multilinguality
and multi-centrality to give way to a perception of a one great, powerful
and unique entity of one “ethnie” in its own historical lands. The memories of the
Balkan Wars and the War of Independence were functional for the Republican elite
for the dissemination of the values of nationalism departing from a love to the land
saved from the enemy. Patriotism born towards the end of the Ottoman Period, soon
29
became a ground for further mobilization of nationalism in the Republican Period for
which the children’s periodicals became significant tools.
What identified Turkishness, corporatism, community, cultural, economic
and social identity and fictional dualities such as being civilized or underdeveloped,
being traditional or modern, being a part of the West or the East, being religious or
secular was a matter of mobilization of the masses and the dissemination of the
ideology at the everyday level by multiple agents defining themselves differently.
But they were in fact, standing on the same flexible basis of nationalist ideology,
which can not just be explained by developments in law and high politics.
Conceptualized as the normative judges by Foucault, it is “teachers, psychologists,
psychiatrists and social workers” who “reach beyond the judicial domain into one
governed by norms affecting aspects of the body that cannot be inscribed with the
exactness of law”42 who are significant actors in shaping the maps of meaning
regarding children in the 1930s’ Turkey.
The Republican adults of different professions from bureaucracts, civil
servants and teachers to sociologists, doctors and other intelligentsia were the main
actors taking place in the establishment of the nation-state. They advocated and
initiated the projects of the immediate modernization and development of the country
and wanted to mobilize the masses towards the route of progress. Children in this
sense were significant actors of the society through whom the metaphors of the birth
and progress of the nation-state would be portrayed.
This chapter focuses on the political discourse of the periodicals in terms of
their common-sense visions of the relationship between the nation-state and her
children and the political roles and burdens that were attributed to them in terms of
42 Martin Hewitt, "Bio-Politics and Social Policy: Foucault's Account of Welfare," Theory, Culture &
Society 2, no. 1 (1983): 67.
30
their political socialization especially during the 1930s when the one-party state had
a great hegemony in the country. The political value of children was much higher
than their essential value as beloved sons and daughters. This common-sense
perception rose on the basis that the people of the Turkish nation-state would be
nationalized, modernized and civilized but at most regularized due to the
governmental reason of the modern nation-state for the welfare of the great Turkish
nation. Education was the key arena and teachers publishing and writing in these
periodicals since the adoption of the Latin Alphabet had vital roles in disseminating
the values to children regarding nationalism and the power of the state which is in
fact, a general aura of all nationalist projects. The basic values wanted to be instilled
onto children were shaped around the faith in an equation of the nation with the
child, disjunction from the past and secularism and the ideals of a colonialist
progress as reflected in adventure stories and some other writings. The onset of the
Second World War brought a new dimension to the burdens of children and their
roles as today’s boy and girl scouts but tomorrow’s soldiers were much more
emphasized.
The Adoption of the Latin Alphabet: New Words for the Emptied Worlds
The turning point for the 1930s in terms of the mobilization efforts towards
children was much more related to the adoption of the Latin Alphabet in 1928 which
paved the way for leading children’s periodicals with fresh motivations to emerge by
new investors in the publishing arena. The acceptance of the Latin Alphabet is the
most radical movement for the envisioned progress of society, beginning with the
education of the masses according to the norms of the “Western Civilization”. It was
31
both a sign of the Republican sensitivity towards the route of Western civilization
and an act of political and cultural mobilization in the public sphere in favour of a
great break with the entity of Ottoman past and integration into the modern and
secular nation-state politics. It was both a prerequisite of imagining the Turkish
community43 as embedded in an homogenious racial, ethnic, historical entity under
the auspieces of the modern Turkish nation-state and a movement to start a
mobilization of education in favour of a regeneration, development and progress of a
primordially perceived Turkish nation that “deserved to be” a part of the Western
modernity. Due to the statistical records given by Owen and Pamuk, enrollment in
elementary schools increased from approximately %22 school age children in 1925
to %45 in 1945 and overall illiteracy rates declined from %81 in 1935 to %70 in
1945.44
But there is something very significant: This mobilization in discourse seems
to create an illusion in which the country as a whole and unified identity is
progressing rapidly and the children all over the Turkish territory both from the city
and the countryside are involved in a unified modernization process. But this is not
the case. The acceptance of the Latin Alphabet is a great change but not for the
children living in the countryside under poor conditions if they are not the sons and
daughters of bureaucrats and civil servants such as station chiefs in the countryside.
As Owen and Pamuk continue to highlight, “if gains were made in life expectancy,
health and education during the inter-war period, these most have occurred primarily
in the urban areas. Government policies must have reinforced this pattern since the
43 Benedict R. O'G Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, Rev. and extended ed. (London ; New York: Verso, 1991). and Ernest Gellner, Nations
and Nationalism, New Perspectives on the Past (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).
44 Roger Owen and Sevket Pamuk, "Turkey, 1918-1945," in A History of the Middle East Economies
in the Twentieth Century (1998): 26.
32
health and education spending of the single-party regime favored the city.”45 So,
although these periodicals had circulations in Anatolia, their customers in Anatolia
were the sons and daughters of state administrators, bureaucrats, teachers and
soldiers as the readers’ letters show. The perception that is wanted to be instilled onto
children that the society is full of adrenaline together, in a unique, organic identity
running towards the dream of the nation-state seems really to be a great illusion in
the countryside. The city was changing; schools were opened, factories were
constituted but not with so much effect as the discourse in the periodicals show.
Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic and the other
transformations in the public sphere regarding the efforts of modernization, the
acceptance of the Latin Alphabet marked a great transformation in the metaphorical
space and in fact the metaphors of nationalism came before its effects at the social
level. Nationalism as an economic, cultural and political phenomenon was something
to be taught to the masses and its metaphors would have to be disseminated for the
sake of the envisioned transformation towards nation-state politics in society. There
was a discourse of disjunction with the past; but of course there was no disjunction
with the past at the everyday level, a Republic had been established, a national claim
was made based on a great trauma of lost lands, the Balkan wars, the Independence
War and the ghosts of nationalism were floating in the air and looking for channels to
flow in. As Ahmet Oktay evaluates, the period was one of an illusion in which
everything was believed to be made out of nothing.46 The Republic did not enter
such a transformation free from the problems that it had inherited from the earlier
years. Many things were changing, but many things were insistent on resisting those
45 Ibid: 28.
46 Ahmet Oktay, Yeni Edebiyat Dergisi: Yazın Ve Sanat Anlayısı, Toplumcu Gerçekçiligin Kaynakları
(Bilim, Felsefe, Sanat Yayınları, 1986): 332.
33
changes. The sources of the culture of the Turkish nation, its connection to Islam, the
masses as the source of the new regeneration of the Turkish nation and the debates
around the construction of language were not on the agenda of only the constructers
of the nation-state-bureaucratic elite-but most of the intelligentsia who also attributed
to themselves great roles in this period of transition. All the problematics above had
their roots in the whole experience of Turkish nationalism that had been discussed
for a long time in the pre-Republican period.
Nationalism had risen gradually since the end of the nineteenth century,
especially by the developments in language and literature since the Young Turks,
which is most seen in the debates about the purification of Ottoman Turkish. The
economic policies of the CUP aiming the establishment of a national bourgeois
regime made the issue more political because the element of Turkishness then began
to be more emphasized. The boundary for the previous claims of nationalism was the
protection of the Ottoman State. The Ottoman state as the social unit was still on the
minds of the pre-Republican elite and an apparent Turkish nationalism like that of
the post-Balkan War period was not there yet.47 However, the rising claims of
Turkish nationalism with the main trauma of the Balkan Wars were complemented
with the establishment of the Republic, which was a disjunction at the discourse
level, in fact which was ontologically identified by this disjunction.
After the adoption of the Latin Alphabet, the source for the regeneration of
the language was looked for in Central Asia and the political route of the regime in
this sense towards purification of the language was made apparent gradually in the 3
congresses of Turkish Language Investigation Institute (TDTC) from 1932 to 1936.
The decisions taken in the 1st Congress in 1932 were as such: collecting and
47 See for details: Masami Arai, "The Genç Kalemler and the Young Turks: A Study in Nationalims,"
METU Studies in Development 12, no. 3-4 (1985): 199.
34
publishing the words that the people used, producing new words from pure Turkish
roots and offering the use of these pure Turkish words instead the words of foreign
origin for the words of the same meaning48 Due to the decisions of these congresses
that were radicalized after 1936, new lists of words were published periodically to
mobilize the people for the project of regenerating the language in the popular
newspapers and journals of the time. Ottoman Past was an interesting loss of
memory in this sense whose cultural and etymological heritage was a real target of
hatred in this process.
Çocuk Sesi seems to have felt itself very responsible about this mobilization
and it had attributed itself the role of educating the child readers of Çocuk Sesi
according to the new cultural policies directed at the language issue. Especially from
1934 onwards, Çocuk Sesi started to publish the lists of new words and nearly all the
writers of the periodical wrote with the new ‘purified’ or ‘constructed’ words. The
meanings of the new words were written under the passages; but it was very clear
that, there had been a great discontinuity in the language in a very short time and the
texts were really difficult to read with those words.
What is interesting about the purification of the language is that, apart from
apparent policies and their reflections targeted in the public sphere by the state, there
was also a policy targeted on the names of the people. People were changing their
names and were getting names that were purely from Turkish origin. The names
were also being purified and regenerated and Çocuk Sesi was again active in this
process to disseminate its readers the ‘honourable’ act of converting the names if
they were not from Turkish origin. In 1932, an announcement took place in Çocuk
Sesi about the 44 Turkish and Jew students (both boys and girls) continuing to a
48 Soner Çagatay, “Otuzlarda Türk Milliyetçiliginde Irk, Dil ve Etnisite”, Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi
Düsünce- Milliyetçilik, vol. 4, (stanbul: letisim Yayınları, 2002): 249-257.
35
primary school in Beyoglu. They had applied on their own to the Ministry of the
Republic by a letter declaring their wish for changing their names. In this letter,
according to Çocuk Sesi, the children had requested to be given Turkish names that
they had attached to the letter and to be ‘saved’ from names of foreign origin. Their
teacher, named ‘Oguz’ had visited their parents and as soon as he became sure that
the parents allowed the changes, the scene was ready for the new names of children
and they were as such: Haydar became Damar, Sabahattin became Cengiz, Niyazi
became Yavuz, Mustafa became Çetin, Fahrettin became Yıldırım, Donna became
Gündüz, and sak became Orhan.49
As the Republic was established by “an illusion in which everything was
believed to be made out of nothing”, this “nothing” had to be presented to the
masses, The Republic politically unconsciously needed an imaginative visualization
of its aims which should begin from the children of the yet infant republic and it was
believed that the children’s periodicals would be great tools for the mobilization of
the minds of children; the future adult citizens of the Turkish Republic. In this
respect, Faruk Gürtunca and Tahsin Demiray, the two leading figures of children’s
periodicals and owners of the most popular periodicals between the 1930s and 40s,
opened the space to the most popularized type of nationalist sentiments to be
expressed and instilled onto children.
49 “Yeni Türk Adları, 40 Talebenin ismi Türkçeye çevrildi. Vekalet tesekkür etti”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 155
(19 December 1932): 9.
36
Faruk Gürtunca and Tahsin Demiray’s Periodicals: Narrators of the Nation-State to
the Child Audience
Faruk Gürtunca and Tahsin Demiray were the two important figures of the
Early Republican period who published periodicals for primary school children of
the time and continued to publish their periodicals for longer terms than any other
publishers. Their professional status as teachers was an advantage for them while
they were writing for children. Among the periodicals published by them, the most
popular were Çocuk Sesi (1928), Afacan (1934), Gelincik (1936), Çocuk Romanları
(1941) and Çocuk Gözü (1945) by Faruk Gürtunca50 under the auspices of Ülkü
Publishing House; and Haftalık Resimli Gazetemiz (1924), Resimli Mecmua (1925),
Ates (1930), Yavrutürk (1936), Cumhuriyet Çocugu (1938), Binbir Roman (1939)
and Çocuk Haftası (1943) by Tahsin Demiray under the auspices of Türkiye
Publishing House.51
Faruk Gürtunca was a graduate of the Edirne Teachers’s School and he was a
teacher in Edirne before he began to publishing periodicals for children. He even had
gone to School of Dentistry after the Teachers’s School, but his main job became
publishing in stanbul. He did not continue his career as a teacher in stanbul while
he was publishing periodicals, but from his signatures in Çocuk Sesi where he signed
as Teacher M. Faruk, it can be guessed that he preferred to identify himself as a
teacher. As will be later seen through Çocuk Sesi, most of the issues presented in his
50 There were also Genç Liseli, Okul ve Ögretmen, Her Ay, Her Hafta published by him.
51 A more detailed summary about these periodicals can be read from Seyma Gençel's short article.
Seyma Gençel, "Çocuk Dergileri." in Türkiye’de Dergiler Ansiklopediler(1849-1984), (stanbul:
Gelisim Yayınları,1984): 185-202.
37
periodicals through stories, news and other items, based their ideals on the
dissemination of nationalism by a consciousness of history and tradition together
with the belief in progress.52 But among all these Çocuk Sesi was particularly
successful in establishing a special place for itself as it attracted children of the
primary school level with its campaigns, rewards and club activities, the most
attended of which were cinema days, competitions and rewards arranged by the
periodical’s effort to create an interactive community of children.53 This can also be
observed in the periodicals of Tahsin Demiray, especially in Yavrutürk and Çocuk
Haftası which was published after Yavrutürk had been closed down.
Tahsin Demiray established the Türkiye Publishing House in 1923.54 This
publishing house was a valuable site for most of the nationalist and Turanist
discourse of the 1930s and 1940s. Demiray had certainly Turanist tendencies as
52 Gürtunca’s political stance that is both a mixture of official ideology and Turanism is also visible in
the names of his books that were mostly published by Ülkü Publishing House. 23 Nisanı Hızlandıran
Türk (Saruhan Mebusu Mahmut Celal Bey), 1956; Alp Arslan Oglu Meliksah, 1971; Anadolu, 1939;
Atatürk'e Agıt (Millete Destan), Bu Aslana Dokunmayın, 1939, Büyük Hakan Alp Arslan, Selçuklu
Tarih ve Medeniyeti Enstitüsü, 1971, Dokunmayın Bu Vatana (Moskoflara Cevap) (Resimleyen:
Münif Fehim), 1946. Dokunmayın Bu Aslana was adapted to a film directed by Vedat Örfi Bengü in
1952. Hasan Pulur reminds us about the popularity of this novel in one of his articles about Turkish-
Italian relations where he blames Italy because of giving hostage to Abdullah Öcalan and tries to
legitimize his thoughts by looking at some historical events: “O günlerde, yani 1930’ların sonunda,
Türkiye’de, bu kadar olmasa bile yine talya aleyhinde bir hava vardır ve rahmetli merhum Faruk
Gürtunca’nın Dokunmayın Bu Aslana adlı kitabı, fasist talya’ya agzının payını verdigi için, peynir
ekmek gibi satılmaktadır”, Hasan Pulur, "Tarih Ve talya," Milliyet, 21 December 1998. Gürtunca is
also famous for his nationalist poems at that time. He has many famous poems that still take place in
today’s national education textbooks.
53 In 1936, Çocuk Sesi announced that, the Club of Çocuk Sesi had members numbering more than
10.000 and the children having watched the movies projected by Çocuk Sesi had numbered at least
3000. “14üncü Cildimize Baslarken; Harf nkılabının lk Günündenberi Tatil Yapmadan Çıkan Biricik
Mecmua (ÇOCUK SES) oldu; Çocuk Sesi sekiz yılda 800.000 Türk Çocugu Tarafından Okundu”,
Çocuk Sesi, no. 326, (23 March 1936):3. Another reason behind the popularity of Gürtunca’s and
Demiray’s periodicals was that, they published qualified comics of Walt Disney. Walt Disney comics
were introduced to Turkey in 1936 by Çocuk Sesi under the auspices of Ülkü Publishing House. See
“Miki Fare ile Pipo Gizli Polis Ajanı”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 334 (18 May 1936): 1. There were also other
popular pieces from American culture such as news about American stars which was attracting
children. The child star Shirley Temple was the most popular image of American culture in child
readers of the 1930s. Yavrutürk had even published a special edition in the name of her and also in
1938, a series about a fictive voyage with Shirley all around stanbul was published. “Sirley
stanbulda”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 105 (30 April 1938): 4.
54 Eser Tutel, "Türkiye Yayınevi", stanbul Yazıları, Tarih ve Toplum, no. 164, (stanbul: letisim
Yayınları, September 1997).
38
understood from his publication policy, expressed both in the books he published and
the subject of the Turanist stories included in Yavrutürk and Cumhuriyet Çocugu in
the 1930s about the Turks in Central Asia and their victories before the Ottoman
days written by mostly Aptullah Ziya Kozanoglu.55 Demiray’s political tendency was
similar to that of Faruk Gürtunca’s: a mixture of offical ideology and Turanism; but
their Turanism was bounded by the limits drawn by the six arrows of the Republic in
the 1930s and 1940s.56 They never passed the limit into the position of Nihal Atsız
although they had an intimate relationship with the thoughts of Atsız. Tahsin
Demiray had published and distributed Atsız’s Bozkurtların Ölümü and Bozkurtlar
Diriliyor which were perceived as the greatest books on the Turanist discourse of the
time. And an appreciative review article including very few negative points
regarding the books of Tahsin Demiray and Aptullah Ziya Kozanoglu was published
in Atsız Mecmua in 1931.57
The political motivations of Demiray become more visible looking at his
personal history in the political arena. He was one of the founders of the Turkish
Peasants’ Party with Remzi Oguz Arık and was also active in the following
Republican Peasants’ Nationalist Party. He was also one of the founders of the
Justice Party and a member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly in 1961. So, his
55 Some of their names were Kolsuz Kahraman about the Kirghiz Alpago fighting with Chinese
Khans, Gül Tekin, Olcayto Bahadır, The Turkish Raiders in the Heart of Europe(Avrupanın
Göbeginde Türk Akıncıları) by Kozanoglu; Galiçyada Koç Mustafa by Sezai Attila, The Children of
History(Tarihin Çocukları) by skender Sertelli published in Çocuk Sesi and The Golden Carriage,
The Silver Wheel(Altın Araba, Gümüs Tekerlek) by Burhan Bilbasar published in Cumhuriyet Çocugu.
56 The Kemalist ideology and Turanism were sometimes in harmony, sometimes in a tense
relationship. In the beginning of the 1930s, the relationship between them was tense because the
Kemalist ideology did not base its ideals on a racist expansionism. Kemalist ideology preferred to
adopt a nationalism in harmony with Western civilizational norms and advocated “Peace in the
Country, Peace in the World” which was perceived as an obstacle by most of the Turanists. Orhangazi
Ertekin, “Cumhuriyet Döneminde Türkçülügün Çatallanan Yolları”, Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi
Düsünce-Milliyetçilik, Vol. 4, (stanbul: letisim Yayınları, 2002): 373.
57 K.A., "Kitaplar," Atsız Mecmua 1, no. 2 (15 June 1931): 46-47.
39
Republicanist tendencies were limited to the six arrows between the 1930s and the
middle of the 1940s which paved the way for a more visible account of his political
motivations that were not on the surface during the single-party regime. This can be
understood very well from the volumes of Çocuk Haftası between 1958 and 1962.
Çocuk Haftası was published again between these years after its closure down in
1949. In these years, Çocuk Haftası was almost an Islamic morality source for
children of the time. The weekly Religion lessons with regard to good morals in
Çocuk Haftası between 1958 and 62 could not take place in 1930s and 1940s when
both Gürtunca’s and Demiray’s periodicals were in the forefront of secularism and
the six arrows as shaped by the progress, development and modernization ideals of
the one-party regime.
The acceptance of the Latin Aphabet implied also a personal turning point for
Tahsin Demiray: Demiray had made his wealth, which he later invested in
publishing, from the right he had gained to publish the new alphabet for both primary
schools and public schools.58 This was a very intelligent move. He also made wise
investments so that his periodicals became the most popular ones above with those of
Faruk Gürtunca’s.59 This popularity sometimes is told us by writers who were
children around the 1930s and 1940s and grew up reading the most popular
children’s periodicals published by Demiray and Gürtunca. The words of a
conservative intellectual Orhan Okay give us clues both about a childhood
experience in the 1930s and his personal history being shaped from his reading habits
in his childhood:
58 Orhan Okay, "Geçmis Zaman Kitapçıları 3", Zaman, 6 October 2002.
59 Some other books that helped to increase his institution’s prestige were Aptullah Ziya Kozanoglu’s
novels, Our War Of Independence (stiklal Harbimiz) by Kazım Karabekir and The Chronology of
Ottoman History (Osmanlı Tarihi Kronolojisi) by smail Hami Danismend.
40
I guess everyone growing up in a bureaucrat family in stanbul in the
1930s and 1940s must have had a similar adventure like mine with
reading. Despite the Rüstiye education of my mom and dad, and my
sister going to middle or high school then, we did’t have a library in
our house...But my sister was reading a periodical with big
dimensions called Çocuk Duygusu and sometimes bought Çocuk Sesi
and Afacan. In the Balat Bazaar close to our house, at the crossroads,
was the shop of Tahsin Demiray, where one could find newspapers
and periodicals. Yavrutürk, which I first saw there, became the first
periodical I bought with my own desire and money and followed until
the end of the primary school. Yavrutürk published by Demiray and
including writers such as Rakım and Nimet Çalapala, was the most
long-term qualified periodical of the time... I don’t know if it is
necessary to say that I was so effected that I tried to imitate Yavrutürk
and published a little periodical. When Yavrutürk announced that it
would give books as rewards to its readers who sent their
photographs, my photo was sent there, too. Maybe finding my photo
among tens of readers’ photos gave me great pride of being seen in a
published material. Then we went with my mother to Türkiye
Publishing House in Cagaloglu to get my reward. Tahsin Demiray
was an excited Turkist. My award was an illustrated Tepegöz story,
which became the first book of my library60
Okay’s was an stanbul childhood, for example Fethi Naci as a person
growing up in Giresun, says that although he knew Faruk Gürtunca’s periodicals as
sharing the monopoly of children’s periodicals with Tahsin Demiray, they were not
available outside the big cities or in the countryside as Demiray’s were.61 This tells
us of the reader potential of Tahsin Demiray’s periodicals. Gürtunca’s periodicals
60“Bir memur ailesi içinde 1930'lu, 40'lı yıllarda çocuklugunu stanbul'da geçiren herkesin bana
benzer veya yakın bir kitap serüveni yasamıs oldugunu tahmin ederim. Annemin ve babamın rüstiye
tahsiline, üniversiteye kadar gidecek olan ablamın da o yıllarda ortaokul yahut lisede olmasına
ragmen evimizde kütüphane yoktu... Ablam Çocuk Duygusu adlı büyük boyda bir dergiyi de takip
ediyor, bazen de Çocuk Sesi ve Afacan adlı dergileri alıyordu. Evimize yakın Balat çarsısında, dört
yol agzında Acem dedigimiz (stanbulluların o zamanlar Acem dedikleri bu insanların ran Türkleri
olduklarını epey sonra ögrenecektim) Tahsin Bey'in, gazete ve dergi de bulundurdugu bir büfesi vardı.
Orada görüp aldıgım Yavrutürk, benim kendi istegim, kendi paramla(!) alıp tâ ilkokul sonlarına kadar
takip ettigim ilk dergi oldu. Tahsin Demiray'ın çıkardıgı, Rakım ve Nimet Çalapala'ların yazdıgı
Yavrutürk, döneminin en uzun ömürlü ve kaliteli çocuk dergisiydi. Yavrutürk'ü taklitle bir "Küçük
Dergi" çıkardıydıydım (belki birçok evde çocukların bu gibi hevesleri oldugunu düsünerek)
söylememe gerek var mı? Yavrutürk, dergide fotografı çıkan okuyucularına kitap hediye ettigini ilân
edince benim de bir resmim gönderildi; onlarca okuyucu fotografı arasında kendimi bulmam, acaba
ilk defa bir yayın organında görünmüs olmam gururunu mu vermisti? Sonra annemle beraber,
Cagaloglu'nda, Vilayet binasının hemen alt tarafında bulunan Türkiye Yayınevi'ne giderek
promosyonumuzu aldık. Tahsin Demiray epey heyecanlı bir Türkçüydü, aldıgımız kitap da yine kendi
yayını olan ve çocuklar için resimlendirilmis bir-iki formalık bir Tepegöz hikâyesiydi. Bu da
kütüphanemin ilk kitabı oldu.” Orhan Okay, "Kitap Sevdası," Zaman, 4 March 2002.
61 Turhan Güney, "Fethi Naci le Söylesi," Cumhuriyet Kitap, 6 June 2002.
41
were very popular in Anatolian cities too as understood from the readers’s letters.
But again, these letters coming from Anatolia, which will be discussed at length in
the second chapter, usually belonged to the middle-class children of bureaucrats and
other state officials living in Anatolia. The audience of the periodicals mostly were
children of these middle-class Republican families living in urban areas.62
The last example regarding the popularity of the periodicals comes from
Altemur Kılıç’s words about his childhood. Kılıç uses his memory and puts his
childhood as an ideal to criticize the “decadent” children and youth of recent times
“having no moral values” and idealizes his generation for its reading habits by an
ahistorically conservative perspective:
Why were we unique?...First of all, we were the generation
following the National Struggle. We grew up with the real stories of
our dad and granddads. And what we read in our childhood were not
those pornographic novels, silly periodicals and immoral web sites.
The films we watched didn’t include the same disgraceful materials
either as well as those televoles and violence staff of today. What we
did read? What we did read with great enthusiasm and wonder were,
for example, the nationalist novels of Aptullah Ziya Kozanoglu such
as Kolsuz Kahraman, Türk Korsanlar; the stories telling the race of
Turkish and Greek submarines or science fiction stories such as the
first Turks going into Space published in Çocuk Sesi and Afacan
periodicals published by Faruk Gürtunca. And the similar nationalist
children’s and youth periodicals such as Ates and Binbir Roman
published by Tahsin Demiray...Then what happened and we broke up
with these? I know, we can’t bring back those days again! But it
62 In fact, when we look at most of the issues of these periodicals, we can understand the urban nature
of them by their approach to the village. Although donated with the belief in the significance of
development of the villages and peasants for the sake of the country whose population mostly lived in
the countryside, the village was perceived as an “other”, far away place. The progress of the villages
and the peasants was a very significant issue and it was reflected in many poems and pieces in other
children’s periodicals too. See Rifat Arıncı, “Köy ve Köylü”, Çocuk, no. 126 (17 February 1939): 2.
These pieces mostly aimed to exalt the peasants due to the words of Atatürk that “The peasant is the
master of the nation”. There were poems about young teachers who went to those far villages for the
sake of the village and left all the people they lived behind because they believed it was their duty. See
R.G.Arkın, “Vazife Sevgisi-Okul Piyesi”, Çocuk,no. 132 (31 March 1939): 12. But on the other hand,
the villages were portrayed as far away places where just green trees, many animals,and peasants lived
in harmony without any conflict. All the villagers were portrayed as working happily for the progress
of the country in their beautiful villages. See the cover pages of Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 29 and no.
39 (1939). But in fact, the dissatisfaction of the peasants with the economic policies of the one-party
regime especially after the onset of the Second World War would contribute in the Republican
People’s Party falling from power and the rising of the power of Democrat Party.
42
mustn’t give harm to anybody to think loudly and nostalgically about
the gap of our generations!63
The words quoted above, regardless of the political orientations of the people
saying them, tell something about the common sense acknowledgement regarding the
popularity of Gürtunca’s and Demiray’s children’s periodicals in the big cities in the
1930s and 1940s. This helped in the decision of which periodicals to choose, apart
from my criteria of their having sold much more than any other periodical of the
time, the proportion of being read not just in stanbul but also in other cities and
being published for a long time. This is why I especially chose Çocuk Sesi64 of
Gürtunca, published by Ülkü Publishing House between the years 1928-39 as the
backbone of this chapter. It must be admitted that, although Yavrutürk65 (1936-42) of
Demiray published by Türkiye Publishing House, was being sold in more places
outside stanbul since 1936, the year when they rose as the two popular periodicals
published in stanbul, Çocuk Sesi would be a more illuminating material about the
63 "Biz neden baska türlü idik?…Herseyden evvel, Milli mücadelenin hemen sonrasının kusagı idik.
Babalarımızın, dedelerimizin gerçek öyküleri ile büyüdük. Bir de bizim çocuklugumuzda baslıca
okuduklarımız pornografik romanlar, abuk sabuk dergiler ve internetteki ahlaksızlık siteler degildi…
Gördügümüz filmlerde aynı kepazelikler olmadıgı gibi, TV daki televoleler vb. , siddet ve pislik telkin
eden plaklar yoktu, bizim zamanımızda. Ne mi okurduk?: Bizim heyecan ve merakla okuduklarımız,
mesela Faruk Gürtunca merhumun yayınladıgı ÇOCUK SESi veya AFACAN dergilerinde , Abdullah
Ziya Kozanoglu merhumun Kolsuz Kahraman,Türk Korsanla gibi hamaaset romanlarını, Türk ve
Yunan Denizaltılarının yarısını anlatan veya Fezaya -Uzaya giden lk Türkler gibi. Blim Kurgu
romanların , Tahsin Demiray' merhumun yayınladıgı aynı türden ATES ve BNBR ROMAN adlı milli
gençlik ve ve çocuk dergileri idi…Sonra ne oldu da bunlardan koptuk Biliyorum o günlere geri dönüs
olamaz artık ! Ama teorik de olsa biz nasıl öyle olduk ta, bugün bazıları baska türlü olabiliyorlar diye
nostaljik olarak yüksek sesle düsünmemin de, herhalde zararı yok ya!"Altemur Kılıç, Nerede Yanlıs
Yaptık? (http://www.elaziz.net/yazar/altemur/03.htm, 02 April 2001 [cited].
64 In the first page of Çocuk Sesi, was written “Published Every Fifteen DaysUnder the Auspices of
the Minsitry of Education For Now”(Maarif Vekaletinin Himayesinde Smdilik 15 Günde Bir Çıkar).
The owner of the periodical was written as Faruk Gürtunca and the price of subscription to the
periodical was written as such: 125 kuruss for 25 issues, 75 kuruss for 15 issues and 50 kuruss for 10
issues.
65 When Yavrutürk was first published, the price of subscription per year was 130 kuruss and 65
kuruss per 6 months.
43
metaphors of nationalism and the state through children as it started to be published
in 1928, eight years before Yavrutürk appeared on the stage.
Also, Cumhuriyet Çocugu (1938-39) which was being published by Zahide
Tan when it first appeared in 1938 but then in 1939 passed to the ownership of
Demiray’s Türkiye Publishing House where Rakım and Nimet Çalapala, the two
teachers wrote was chosen more as a supporting source than for its popularity as it
was published only two years, between 1938-39.66 Another supporting source is the
periodical Çocuk of Children’s Protection Society headed by Fuat Umay. Çocuk was
published by Children’s Protection Society in January 1936 until 1948 in place of
The Robust Turkish Child (Gürbüz Türk Çocugu). I have not given much reference to
Çocuk as it deserves to be analyzed with the social history of the Children’s
Protection Society.67
Looking at the environment in which these periodicals were published, it is
seen that the writer of one periodical often wrote in other periodicals, too. This tells
us that there was no rigid institutionalization of the publishing houses which
preferred to cooperate on the process of the projection of the nation-state onto
children. There seems to have been a loose atmosphere of writing for children, where
the leading roles of Faruk Gürtunca and Tahsin Demiray are undeniable. The writers
of their periodicals usually wrote on similar issues and subjects on the forefront of
similar identifications and projects of the nation. In the introduction, was mentioned
the valuable comment of Tony Watkins regarding the stories and narratives we tell
66 When Cumhuriyet Çocugu passed to the ownership of Demiray, it was announced as a partner of
Yavrutürk. In one issue of Cumhuriyet Çocugu, it was written that Yavrutürk was published for the
first, second and third classes of the primary school while Cumhuriyet Çocugu targeted the older
students starting from the fourth class and together they would work for the welfare of the Turkish
children: "Ders Materyali Sayfalarımız," Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 13 (1939).
67 For a recent and detailed analyisis about the specific place of Çocuk with reference to Children’s
Protection Society, see Erhan G. Gürsoy, “1930’ların Kültür ve Egitim Anlayısının Çocuk Esirgeme
Kurumu Nesriyatı Çocuk Dergisi’ndeki Yansımaları”, Kebikeç, no. 19, (2005): 373-387.
44
and give children that constitute the maps of meaning that enable children to make
sense of the world and shape the way children find a home in the world.68 The
periodicals chosen for this chapter rise on similar maps of meaning in the context of
the 1930s Turkey regarding the illusions and fictive visualizations of the nation-state
which I find as common-sense perceptions. This is why I want to make
categorizations about the themes included in these maps rather than categorizing the
periodicals between themselves.
Who Does the Child Belong To?
Children! You know, you should better know that every Turkish child
belongs to the nation as much as it belongs to its parents. It belongs to
the people of its nation. The people of the Turkish nation all desire
deeply as much as your mothers and fathers to see you studying hard,
to see you healthy and to see you being educated and grow up with
the high morals and traditions of the Turkish country. Our eyes are on
you. We want you to grow up with healthy minds and bodies, with
the best and highest morals and with a commitment of love to
Turkish will more than any of your individual desires. Start to get
ready from now on to be the establishers of the great Turkish future;
keep these words always in your ears that a lazy one can not be a
Turk, an immoral one can not be a Turk. I virtually trumpet for the
truth that, the lazy ones and the ones who do not pay attention to
grow up with high morals among you will be our future enemies…69
When talking about the relationship between the child and the nation, it is not
very difficult to guess how the child becomes a metaphor of the nation carrying the
68 Watkins, "Cultural Studies, New Historicism and Children's Literature."Ibid.
69 "...Çocuklar...Bilirsiniz, daha iyi biliniz ki her Türk çocugu anasının, babasının oldugu kadar
milletinindir. Budununundur. Sizin saglıgınıza, sizin çalısmanıza, sizin budun ülkesine ve törelerine
uygun yetismenize ananız, babanız kadar bütün Türklük yürekten bagldır.. Can gözlerimiz üstünüze
dikilmistir. Sizin kafaca, bedence saglam, gürbüz yetismenizi, ahlakca en iyi ve en yüksek yetismenizi,
millet dilegini kendi isteklerinizden üstün tutan gönülle yetismenizi istiyoruz...Büyük Türk yarının
yapıcıları arasına girmek için simdiden hazırlanan güzel çocuklar, daima kulagınızda çınlasın ki
çalıskan olmayan, Türk sayılmaz, ahlaklı olmayan Türk olamaz. Simdiden bagırarak söylüyorum ki
sizlerden çalısmayanlar, iyi yetismege kulak asmayanlar bizim yarınki düsmanlarımızdır..", "23 Nisan
Çocuk Bayramında Ankaradaki Merasimde Maarif Vekili Doktor Resit Galip Beyin Nutku," Çocuk
Sesi, no. 174 (1 May 1933).
45
present of the nation and its potential future. According to the ideology of “adult”
nationalists; who are ideological in two senses: both ideological by their political
orientations and as adults; the child is priceless because of its potential because “it is
new born and is waiting to be filled with a meaning.” A meaning and identity with
which the adult world will provide to it.
In this sense, the child as a new born entity and the nation-state as a modern
and again as a new born entity is the main push behind the allegory constructed
between the child and the nation-state. This can be called a universal tendency
related to the associations made between the linear understanding of history and the
child where the child stands just at the zero point, and will show its light in the
future, in the positive part of the historical time that will be donated with meaning.
As Köksal reminds us, The Turkish Republic was established just as other
nation-states, on a metaphor of a new start, a new birth and a refreshment
metaphor.70 In a linear understanding of history, this is a period that has to be
donated with meaning carefully to reach at a mature and morally “good” identity in
the civilized world. In a paragraph related to the Festival of April 23 in 1930 in
Çocuk Sesi, the writer, whose name was not signed but I guess, is Gürtunca himself,
makes a comment that presents us the perceived metaphorical relationship between
the child and the nation apparently:
The first light of today’s Republic was born on 23 April. Our army
that was more powerful from then on beat the Greeks and made them
fall into the sea. In a year or two, the Armenian Dream sank. The
British were surprised. Now, just as the first child of a new history
was born and a robust Turkish nation emerged on this sacred day;
today has been accepted as the festival of the Turkish child.71
70 Duygu Köksal, "Ulusun ‘Çocuklugu’, smayil Hakkı Baltacıoglu, nkılap Ve Terbiye", Toplumsal
Tarih,no. 40, vol. 7, (April 1997): 8.
71 Çocuk Sesi Opening Page (23 April 1930): 2. In this respect, the relationship that Köksal constructs
between the date of the anniversary of the National Parliament and the Children's Fest is very
meaningful also. Köksal, "Ulusun ‘Çocuk’lugu, smayil Hakkı Baltacıoglu, nkılap Ve Terbiye," 12.
46
As seen from above, the child becomes a fruitful metaphor for imagining the
nation, especially as an entity that is both fresh in terms of its passion, energy and
potential and readiness to be captivated by society. What Resit Galip says in the
quotation of this part puts the significance of a child as a regime’s political target in
front of us clearly. In this respect, a child is the one who has to be warned strictly
about the things that it can not do and about the qualities that it cannot have while
being appreciated and sacrified in society, because the child is the one who carries in
itself the possibility of contaminating the nation with bad morals and qualities devoid
of a national culture. This is why, besides having the quality of a permanent source
for the future, for the national development and future industriousness of a country,
society is aware that childhood is a temporary period that has to pass and reach at
maturity in the end.72 Being a child is the main motivation for the national
development of a nation, both mentally and physically with all its energy, but it can
not remain as a child. It can not remain an incapable entity. Otherwise, the dystopia
will realize itself concretely in the minds of the adult nationalists because what they
despise and want to get rid of is that underdevelopment caused by “childish”
tendencies and immaturity; they can not remain childish in the hegemonic world of
adult”ism” and progress.
One of the pictures on the cover of Çocuk Sesi in 1934 show clearly how the
perception of the nation-state was visualized on the innocent child figure in white
clothes lying on a silk bed with his beautiful mother smiling down at his face, in her
modern clothes. The child is sleeping and the feeling of cleanliness nearly overflows
from the picture.73
72 Köksal, "Ulusun ‘Çocuk’lugu, smayil Hakkı Baltacıoglu, nkılap Ve Terbiye", 8.
73 Necdet Rüstü, Çocuk Sesi, no. 216 (12 February 1934).
47
Çocuk Sesi, no. 216 (12 February 1934)
The poem written under the cover page is interesting in terms of the
perception regarding the significance of the child not as a person valuable in itself
but for the great tomorrow of the society whose preperations are made today by
overloading the children with great expectations: “Time passes with giant steps/ the
future is entrusted to children/let him grow up, be like a lion, now don’t wake him
/look how ‘tomorrow’ lies in a cradle!”74 As the future lay in children who were
74 “Dev adımları ile geçip gidiyor zaman/ Eline emanettir istikbal çocukların!/Büyüsün, aslan olsun,
uyandırmayın, aman/Bir besigin içinde bakın yatıyor yarın!”, Ibid.
48
expected to be the healthy future generations paving the way to the functionality and
industriality of the population, their physical health was very significant. Most of the
issues of children’s periodicals saved a place for information-giving pieces about
health and physical education among their pages.75
But among these examples, there is one higlighting the objectified “Turkish
child” as the metaphor of the nation-state very much; it is a series of poems written
in Çocuk Sesi between 1935 and 1938 by a teacher from Ankara about his daughter
named Erdem and his expectations from his daughter, which are in fact the commonsense
expectations of most of the Republican adults of the time. The poems both give
us clues about the expectations of the Republican establishment from the children of
the nation-state who are perceived to belong to the Turkish nation and the attitudes of
serious, disciplined Republican fathers, mostly with professions as teachers and
bureaucrats, towards their children at home. The duties the father wants from his
“innocent, angel daughter” are parallel to the duties the founders of the nation-state
wait from the citizens.
My dear Erdem, the light of my life!/ My star shining and rising
everyday on the sky/, How good that you’ve become six today/
Maybe the happiest in the world is me/ thanks to my homeland...You
have such behaviors not all the children have/ the sweetest among
them is that rapid coyness and offence/ my sacred child, keep away
from evil behaviour/ this childishness will pass, your coyness will not
remain/ they are very close: your great mature days.76
75 Selim Sırrı Tarcan, “Selim Sırrı Beyin Saglık Alfabesi”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 255 (12 November 1934):
8; “8’inci Jimnastik Senlikleri”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 279 (29 April 1935): 10; “Salon Jimnastigi, Sıhhatli
Kalmak çin Her Gün 15 Dakika Jimnastik Yapınız”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 289 (8 July 1935): 18-19;
“Saglık Ögütleri”, Çocuk Sesi,no. 347 (17 July 1936) : 7; “Saglık Ögütleri-Aile Bilgisi, Canını Seven
Her nsanın Bilmesi ve Mutlaka Uyması Lazımgelen Saglık Bilgileri”, Cumhuriyet Çocugu, (1939):
23.
76 “Çok sevgili Erdemim, gözümün nuru kızım/Günden güne yükselen, parıldayan yıldızım/Bugün de
girdin iste tamam altı yasına/Dünyanın en bahtiyar insanından farksızım/Yüz süreyim yurdumun
topragına, tasına…Bazı hallerin var ki her çocukta bulunmaz/Bunların en tatlısı çabuk darılmakla
naz/Aziz yavrum kendini fena huylardan sakın/Bu çocukluklar geçer, bu nazlar böyle kalmaz/Sana
büyük günlerin görünmesi çok yakın”. The lines continue with the honour attributed to Erdem
because of being a Turkish child: “Bir kaç bardak almıstı bir gün annen ev için/Bunların renklerine
baktın da için için/Kırmızı renklisine bir isaret gösterdin/Önüme ayırınca sana dedim: Bu
niçin?/’Baba sen türksün’ diye onu da bana verdin/Aziz yavrum çoktandır millet, vatan sözleri/Her
49
As underlined before with references to Köksal and Nandy, childhood was a
valuable period only when handled with its functionality in the minds of the adults of
the establishment; the teachers, bureaucrats, physicians, doctors; the professional
class of the just established nation-state. Childhood was the potential arena for future
ends; otherwise, if the “childish” phase continued, then the future end of the nationstate
in terms of being a mature state would not be achieved; the “coyness” of a little
child was what could destroy the great expectations of the nation-state from the
child. The coyness of a child was only perceived as something sweet when it was
temporary; but the child immediately should grow up and become the robust,
competent, performing, serious, hardworking and industrial individual for the
welfare of the Turkish nation.
The second year, in 1935, the year when the party, the government and the
state was declared to be unified, Halil brahim Yurtseven’s daughter Erdem turned
six. Again, Yurtseven preferred to crown his daughter’s new age and the growing age
of the Republic together; this metaphoric value caused Erdem’s growth process to be
watched out closely:
Erdem, my dear Erdem, my sweetheart Erdem../You will be called a
miss before being called a lady/O the heartcore of the Revolution, O
little lady Erdem!..It has never been seen in the world before/the great
revolutions in such 5-10 years/Let us look what more he will do for
you/The great leader of Turks making the revolutions!/ You are
growing up so happily under the shadow of these/Today is for you
and you for this sacred day!/Never lose a day, behave in the route of
the homeland/Don’t remember anything from the past/ wipe
everything from your mind!/Today your basic job is to be a woman,
be a ladylike woman/To be reared up for the homeland, to grow for
the homeland/To be a virtuous woman, to gain good posture/To rise
by the beauties deep, deep from the heart!77
çıkısta agzından kamastırır gözleri/Vatan sevmek yolunda ruhunda coskunluk var/Türk evladı, bu
sözler düsüncenin eseri, Vatan sever olanlar bunu candan alkıslar.” Halil brahim Yurtseven, "Erdem
Bes Yasını Bitirirken," Çocuk Sesi, no. 240 (30 July 1934): 14.
77 “Erdem, sevgili Erdem, Seker yavrum can Erdem/Güzelliklerle güzel seyler yarasan Erdem/Sana
hanım denmeden önce bayan denecek/Ey devrimin öz suyu! Ey küçük bayan Erdem!/Dogrusu
50
Erdem when she was five.
Erdem, the heartcore of the revolution whose envisioned future posture as a
ladylike woman was perceived to be the vitrine of the modern Turkish Republic,
should never remember anything of the “dark” yesterday and she should wipe
everything from her mind, according to the advice of her father. Because she
symbolized the ideals of the nation-state and, like an empty sign, she should be filled
görülmemis bes on sene içinde/Bu büyük devrimlerin acunda bir benzeri/Bakalım sizing için daha
neler yapacak?/Devrimleri yaratan Türkün büyü önderi../Bunların gölgesinde pek mutlu
büyüyorsun/Bugün senin içindir, sen de bu ak gün için/Bir gün bile kaybetme, yurda gore anıklan/Bir
sey tutma aklında hepsini sil dün için!/Bugün en baslı isin kadın, kadıncık olmak/Yurda göre yetismek,
yurdun için yükselmek/Tözmen bir kadın olmak, iyi kılık kazanmak/Bütün güzelliklerle için,için
yükselmek!” It should be paid attention how old Turkish words are being used around 1930s parallel
to the political developments around the purification of language. H. . Yurtseven, "Erdem Altı Yasını
Bitirirken," Çocuk Sesi, no. 275 (1 April 1935).
51
with the codes of present representing the dawn of the Republic. She belonged to the
newly established nation-state and was being educated due to the norms of this
belonging by her father. It was both the discipline of his father and the discipline of
the nation-state.
Teacher Halil brahim continued to be proud of and gave advice to his
daughter in poems until Erdem was eleven years old. He remained honoured by the
miniature adult behaviour of Erdem who gave up this childishness in time and started
to arrive at a national conscience.78
But the most sensitive point of Erdem’s father, as highlihted above, was the
point that will take us to another sphere of the nation-state’s metaphors: the rejection
of the recent past equated with religious underdevelopment and ignorance; by the
discourse of enlightenment, progress and positivism in favour of a great Turkish
history the roots of which were embedded in Central Asia. He wanted his daughter,
in fact the children of the Turkish Republic to lose their memories, if they carried
anything in their minds of the past and he wanted them never give up competing in
life working hard, going to school and using their intellects; it was that competition
that would pave the way to arriving at the promises of the great tomorrow and being
mature.79
An absolute “tomorrowism” was on the scene; the ideals of progress would
rise on the shoulders of hardworking, innocent but very productive, competent and
78 “Birgün sordun: Dünyada kaç devlet vardır baba?Dedim ki her devletin ülkesi ayrı ayrı/Demek kaç
ülke varsa o kadar devlet vardır/Dedin: Bana sayınız babacıgım bunları…Baba!Siz buralara hep
gittiniz mi dedin?/Hayır dedim bunların görmedim hiç birini!/Peki babacıgım: ya bizim
memleketleri?/Dedin, onların gördüm dedim bir çok yerini/Bu soruslarda derin bir fikir izi
vardı/Gözlerinde okudum bunun parlaklıgını/Yurt duygusile yana içinde besledigin/Bu yüksek
düsüncenin anladım aklıgını/Yurdunu çok sev, yalnız ona baglan, onun ol/Dünyada hiç bir seyde asla
gözün olmasın/Egilme, igrilme hiç/Dogruluklarla ün sal/Günden güne çogalsın, bu öz sevgi
solmasın”, H. . Yurdseven, "Erdem Yedi Yasını Bitirirken," Çocuk Sesi, no. 326 (30 March 1936): 7.
79 H. . Yurtseven, "Erdem Sekiz Yasını Bitirirken," Çocuk Sesi, no. 388 (31 May 1937): 15-16.
52
attractive children of the 1930s which were symbolized by the little lady Erdem, an
important vitrine of Turkish modernization for the eyes of children.
How the Republic Saved Us
The main problem in the perception of the pictures and articles in the
periodicals related to the past is the misperception of isolating a past space of the
Empire from the present and despising it on flexible identifications related to the
glory of the “saviour” in the present, which is the Republic itself and great
expectations from the future. In 1934, a piece written in Çocuk Sesi by a teacher
signed as Muallim hsan, shows how the abstraction applied to the “past” in terms of
its being identified with the superstitious, illiterate, underdeveloped, and autocratic
features of the Sultanate in favour of the new, modern life styles that came with the
civilizational norms of the Republic. According to this, the children of that era were
very unlucky because they were beaten all the time and they had to learn so many
silly things in medreses such as “Babeyli bala bula, Bamborleyli bob bob…”80 The
text continued with the attitudes of the soldiers in war, which Muallim hsan
criticized and made fun of a lot; he told how the soldiers preferred to pray against all
of the technological war machines of the enemy and how they were being beaten
80 Muallim hsan, "Neymis O Günler!..." Çocuk Sesi, no. 253 (29 October 1934): 7. But there is
something very interesting here. Although nationalism and secularism leaves religious identity behind
the ethnic identity which was an effect of the Republican Period, in one of the earlier issues of Çocuk
Sesi, the Armenian Missionaires were insulted and blamed a lot of poisoning the brains of children
with the books about Protestantism that they gave as a gift to children in schools, “çimizde Bir Yılan,
Bir Mikrop Gibi Yasayanlar Kimlerdir? 1000 Sahifelik Koca Bir Kitabı 100 Paraya Veya Bedava
Veren Su htiyar Ermeni Bunu Niçin Sattı?”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 172 (17 April 1933): 10-11. Although
religious identity was not much on the surface in the Republican Era because of secular policies, the
perception of threat as the “old Armenian Missionaire” stemmed from a fear of some children being
misled towards Christianity. Although the Muslim identity had receded, the perception of threat was
identified as a religious identity.
53
because of praying which was perceived as a superstitious act and despised because
of this.81
What saved the people from these ignorant, supine, autocratic, violent days
in the medreses and the Sultanate was the Republic itself, which saved Turkish
society from the heavy iron chains on its ankles and from the cloth over its eye and
now fortunately although it was late in the way of progress, it had made a great
progress and would first reach the nations in front of it and then leave them behind
and lead all the world like it once had. An article comparing Ottoman and Turkish
children from 1938 in Cumhuriyet Çocugu is significant in terms of this perception
idealizing the Republican ideals, which ignored the modern forms of violence
towards children in modern times, while criticizing the Ottoman past in terms of the
“underdeveloped” attitudes in society towards children.82 In this piece, the Central
Asian Turks’ attitudes, especially those of the Huns’ are idealized and said to be
invoked in the Republic again after the bad experience of the Ottoman days.
The Ottoman Turks appreciated children and gave them freedom and
rights like the Huns in the beginning. But, slowly the Ottoman
Sultans and the government who established an absolutist
administration, spoiled the social life of society with their
underdeveloped rules. The best rules and traditions of the Turks were
81 Here, the text continues with despising other supersititious acts of the people living in Empire days
against illneses, epidemic diseases etc. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Huzur is a great novel about this
issue of despising superstition against scientific progress and solution and tries to show the dilemmas
of eliminating the superstitious beliefs of a society just at the edge of a great civilizational
transformation in time of war and poverty following the establihment of the Republic and the debates
on westernization. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Huzur, (stanbul: YKY, 2001).
82 Despising the underdeveloped attitudes of the Ottoman times towards children was also evident in
Çocuk. For example, in one issue, was told about children being punished because of talking about
flying star-shaped kites because in Turkish language, “flying” also comes to mean “exploding”. While
the zaptieh was passing from there, he had heard the words of children and had thought that they were
talking about “exploding the Star Palace”, “Otuz Kırk Sene Evvel, Padisahlık Devrinde Çocuklar
Rahat Bir Uçurtma Bile Uçuramazlardı”, Çocuk, no. 198, (31 August 1940): 3. In another example,
there were illustrations of homeless poor children who had to walk door-to-door like beggars in fest
days and take the food donated from houses and mansions, “Çocuk Esirgeme Kurumunun
Tesekkülünden Önce: Bilhassa senlik günlerinde kimsesiz fakir çocuklar, kapı kapı dilenci gibi
dolasırlar; konaklardan, evlerden verilen kap kap yemekleri paylasırlardı!..”, Çocuk, no. 199, (15
September 1940): 3.
54
forgotten. By this time, the child was ignored, too. Its civil rights
were crushed. The Ottoman child started to be a being overcrowding
the home. It was deprived of all its rights and was beaten, insulted
everyday and started to live a life in the house like a captive. The
father said, “Be as rough as you want with him” when giving his
child to school. The Ottoman child lived so roughly until the collapse
of the Empire…The future adult of the Republic child; it would be
unnecessary to repeat to you the happy and secure life you live now,
you yourself better appreciate your life and its value. If I make you
hear of me by these short pieces of writing, it will be a great
happiness to me.83
This perception was not something new; but what is important in the context
of the children’s periodicals here is the form of this disjunction and denigration of
the past, which was made perfectly evident and by an unaware simplification and
caricaturization. One of the best examples of this is a picture within the boundaries of
an article telling of the glory of the made progress since May 19, which put an end to
the “owl” perceptions of the Empire days when the Turks had been despised by the
Europeans and Americans, with whom the Turks were sitting at the same table, as
could be seen from the leadership of foreign minister, Tevfik Rüstü Aras at the
League of Nations that met in Geneva. As it said, “once the literacy in our nation was
not even %2 although the Turkish children of the present are nearly cultured %100.
In the place where once owls were living, now rises the smoke of modern factory
chimneys.”84 It is very meaningful that the owl in the picture below is flying over the
hodja and mosque, which seem to collapse with the light of Atatürk and the “dawn of
the new era”.
83 Cumhuriyet Çocugu Ögretmeni, "Tarihten Yapraklar, Türk Tarihinde Çocuk," Cumhuriyet Çocugu,
no. 26 (1938): 473.
84 Çocuk Sesi, "Atatürkün Samsuna Ayak Bastıgı Gün: 19 Mayıs," Çocuk Sesi, no. 394 (18 May
1936): 6-7.
55
"Atatürk'ün Samsun'a Ayak Bastıgı Gün: 19 Mayıs"
Çocuk Sesi, no. 394 (18 May 1936).
In another picture, the abstraction of the past in its categorization of clothes
seems interesting. This picture is a great example of the abstracted dualities of the
religious versus the secular and the traditional versus the modern on a linear
understanding of time:
56
Çocuk Sesi,no. 201 (29 October 1933)
57
According to the explanations about the pictures made on the other page, for
example, the three pictures from the left at the bottom are “a student of Medrese, a
student in junior high school in the Constitutional Period and a student of junior high
school in the Republic.”85 In the pictures, what we see is a perception of the
categorization that feeds from the illusions related to the clothes carrying the codes
of the political developments and transformations in life styles towards the Republic,
which made it easier for the children to absorb the difference and be aware of what
was “modern”, “secular” and “scientific” in these pictures. As seen, the pictures have
no faces; because the illusion of modernization and progress was to be made visible
through the clothes, not through an understanding of the agency of the students or the
people in the pictures. In the pictures, people seem to be just empty signs. They are
just like fashion mannequins used for the legitimization of the way towards the
Republic. The same manner was also seen in Çocuk in 1939 where the people from
the sultan to the hodjas of Ottoman Era were portrayed with their clothes as old
images to which the children of the Republic could just laugh. Because the children
of the Republic were born into an era when “young parachutists, an undefeated army,
captains of big ships, little boy scouts, a student who learns reading in just two
months, a child with his coin box, machinists, factory workers and well-informed
miners”86 lived.
85 Çocuk Sesi, no. 201 (29 October 1933): 21-22.
86 “Genç parasütçüler, yenilmez bir ordu, büyük gemi kaptanları, küçük izci, iki ayda okuyan bir
talebe, kumbaralı çocuk, makinistler, fabrika isçileri, bilgili madenciler”, “Biz Bunları Görmedik,
Bunları Biliyoruz”, Çocuk, Special Volume, (29 October 1939): 22-23.
58
"Biz Bunları Görmedik, Bunları Biliyoruz"
Çocuk, Special Edition, (29 October 1939)
59
This kind of categorization through clothes as metaphors or appreciating
“progress” and “modernization” was also visible in one of the school plays in Çocuk
Sesi. In this play named Our Indedpendence and Revolutions (stiklalimiz ve
nkılaplarımız) which was reported to have been presented by the Beyoglu 15th
School, the Atatürk Revolutions were depicted through the dualities between the past
and present clothes and postures in terms of a comparison of an underdeveloped and
uncivilized “before” with the modern, developed “after”. In the play, Çiçek, a
Turkish girl living in Europe and missing her country a lot met her Turkish friends
and told them how great the Turkish Revolutions had echoed in Europe and how
Europe had admired them. In this self-orientalizing tone, the play continued and the
Turkish children represented the transformations in the society through a ceremonial
parade of clothes; first, girls in veils and black sheets came onto the stage and then
modern girls with books in their hands came. First, boys in fez and white, long
traditonal underpants pass and then boys wearing felt hats pass.87 The civilizational
norms of an abstracted, unified, secular West later adapted by the Republic were
represented and appreciated as such over the clothes again, which made the
“achievements” of the Republic more visible in the eyes of the children.
Another significant example related to the discourse of disjunction from the
past was about the appreciation of the abolition of Turkish music from the stanbul
and Ankara National Radios in 1934. This news echoed as such in Çocuk Sesi:
Children, if you have radios or phonographs in your house, you must
have heard Turkish music. Even if this music is said to stem from
Turkish nation, it does definitely not belong to Turkish roots. This
music was making people sleep, mourn and grieve. But, the Turks are
a nation that has chased rainbows from the East to West. This nation
87 "ki Perdelik Mektep Piyesi: stiklalimiz Ve nkılaplarımız," Çocuk Sesi, no. 201 (29 October
1933): 30-33. In this play, as in most of the other pieces too, we also see the legitimization of
corporatism that is used for hiding the class conflicts in the society by creating an illusion of oneness
and unity under the auspices of the great national ideal: “Yasadıgımız devir/Cumhuriyet
devridir/Zengin de bir fakir de/Saraylarda sedirde”, ibid.
60
has never cried, never shed tears!..How could this music be ours? The
Great Ghazi made a great speech in the Public Assembly. Now our
leader guides us in a new music route. Now there is no more Turkish
music in the radios. One day, a music expert who will emerge among
you will hear the voice in the Turkish folk songs and will complete
these voices due to the norms of the Western music and will create
the new Turkish music that we will be pleased to listen to. O the
children interested in music!...Let it be your aim to create this kind of
music that the Ghazi desires.88
Music became a very valuable space in terms of the transformation embedded
in erasing the traditional in favour of the modern, the both of which categories were
flexible and fed from hegemonic abstractions materialized in the East and West
debate. The children wee attributed a great role in transforming the Turkish way of
life as seen in this example; the new music heroes were called on to the stage at this
time. The children of the Republic most of the time were perceived as little heroes in
nearly all the phases of the transformation of society. This was more a pragmatic act
rather than an expression of love. As seen between the lines, children were valuable
not because they were children, but because they were potential adults through whom
the transformation would progress to the future.
Apart from the above examples, there were many stories, apparent ideological
texts, poems, school plays in the periodicals related to the discourse of disjunction
from the past.89 In most of these pieces, the general ideological stance going parallel
88 “Çocuklar, Evinizde radyo varsa veya gramofon bulunuyorsa mutlaka alaturka denilen sarkıları
dinlemissinizdir. Göya Türk musikisi olarak gösterilen bu musiki, hiç de Türk budununun içinden
çıkmıs degildi. Bu musiki insanı uyutur, içe yas verir, ah ve oflandırırdı. Türk Gündogusunda
Günbatısına kadar at kosturmus, medeniyet kurmus bir ulustu. O aglamamıs, gözyası
dökmemisti!…Böyle bir musiki nasıl bizim olabilirdi? Büyük Gazi Büyük Millet Meclisinde bir nutuk
söyledi. Simdi Yüce Önderimiz bize yeni bir musiki yolunu gösteriyor. Artık radyolarda alaturka
müzik kesildi. Bir gün sizin aranızdan dogacak bir musiki ustası Türk köylüsünün, Türk halkının
türkülerinde yasayan sesleri duyacak, onları Garp musikisi ölçülerile tamamlayacak ve bize zevk
duyacagımız Türk musikisini yaratacaktır. Ey musikiye özenci olan çocuklar!..ste ülkünüz Gazinin
istedigi böyle bir musikiyi yaratmak olsun...“, "Cumhuriyet Çocugunun Musikisi, Büyük Gazi Türk
Musikisinde Büyük Degismeler Yapıyor. Alaturka Denilen Uyusturucu Musiki stanbul Ve Ankara
Radyosundan Kaldırıldı," Çocuk Sesi, no. 254 (5 November 1934): 3.
89 See for example "Türk Mektepleri," Çocuk Sesi, no. 197 (2 October 1933), “Ag gibi her tarafı sardı
Türk mektepleri/Türk çocugu okuyor bu bilgi yuvasında/Heybetle yükseliyor mekteplerin her
biri/Yurdumuzun en ucra dagında ovasında/Yarın burdan çıkacak en degerli kumandan/Yarın burdan
61
to the discourse of hatred from recent past in favour of the ideal of progress, was
secularism invoked even in cartoons and fables. It is very interesting that, religion
which was a main reference point in an identity claim in a society until very recent
times, became a target of denigration in the discourse of the establishment and it was
mostly the city, where religious faith was equated with underdevelopment and
superstition. The image of the factory became much more important than the image
of the mosque, which was in fact even drawn to collapse like the empire in the first
picture in this part as we have seen. Religion became just a cultural reference in
invoking the old Turkish ideals in many epic stories about old Turkish heroes:
“Allah” was intoned like a reflex word in most of these stories of Abdullah Ziya and
Sezai Attila, the word “Allah” became a moral feature of the Turkish heroes who
needed the recommendation of Allah for the greatness of their, in fact Turks’ high
morals. Islam was just a cultural link among the people which was preferred to be
invoked seldomly and if invoked, it was done in a very secular tone. In fact, “Tanrı”
was used more than the word “Allah” which was in a sense related to the sanctifying
the old Turkish God, “Tengri.”90
One of the most important aspects making the secular tone so apparent in
Çocuk Sesi was the Darwinist positions seen especially in Ahmet Ekrem’s writings.91
çıkacak en bilgili mühendis/Yarın burdan çıkacak en yüksek bir kahraman/Bundan sonra saramaz
ülkeyi bir duman, sis!/Bu mektepler ülkeye büyük Cumhuriyetin/En mukaddes, en aziz armaganıdır
bugün/Timsalidir burada çocuklar hürriyetin/Falakalar içinde hep inlerdik daha dün!/Yasa
Cumhuriyetin ey aziz mektepleri/lim mesalesinin ısıklarını yakın/Kutsi ocagınıza süsledikçe her
yeri/Cehaleti maziye, gerilere bırakın!”, "Kurtarıcı Cumhuriyet, Üç Perdelik Mektep Piyesi," Çocuk
Sesi, no. 200 (23 October 1933): 4-5.; H. . Yurdseven, "Baska Sekil Hükümetler," Çocuk Sesi, no.
287 (24 June 1935): 11., Sezai Attila, "Hikaye/Padisahım Basasa!," Çocuk Sesi, no. 202 (6 November
1933): 6.
90 “Tanrı sana hamdolsun/Bize verdiklerine!../Bu varlıgı, bollugu/Esirgeme ver gene!/Tanrı Türk
topragını/Sen cennetine döndür!/Ona göz dikenlerin/Sen gözlerini söndür!”, Vildan Asir,
"Çocugumun Duası," Çocuk Sesi, no. 179 (5 June 1933): 7.
91 According to the commemoration of Ahmet Ekrem published in Çocuk Sesi after his death in 1937,
he was born in 1893 the son of a soldier and had very good education and learned English, French,
German and Arabic in his youth. After taking part in the First World War, he went to both Europe and
62
Most of Ahmet Ekrem’s writings in the periodical were based on introducing Darwin
and his theory to children, which was complemented with sanctifying positivism and
scientific knowledge against superstition, which sometimes included religious
intuition as well. Ahmet Ekrem preferred to finish most of his pieces by warning
children with an adult attitude, about being open-minded in a rational manner. For
example, in a piece where he told about Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural
selection after asking the question how it was possible that although life started with
one-cell plants and animals when our world was just born, these plants and animals
changed shape and evolved slowly by slowly until their present shapes. He linked the
subject to the appreciation of progress to reach true knowledge:
People behaved towards Darwin’s theory until recent times in the
same manner of narrow-mindedness and conservatism they behaved
towards new and transformative ideas. There is no doubt that, Darwin
made some mistakes but I ask you, is there anyone who has brought
the whole truth to light about anything? Will you despise the new
ideas that you don’t understand too? Or will you think, care about
them and try to reach truth by making experiments through these new
ideas?92
In an article about the evolution of the human being written by Rakım
Çalapala, a teacher and a writer in 1939 in Cumhuriyet Çocugu, Çalapala put some
pictures of skeletons and skulls, and explained about the discoveries about how the
human being evolved from the ape. After making an analysis about the primitive,
undercivilized and underdeveloped manners of primitive men, Çalapala proudly
mentioned about the great step of progress that had risen on the shoulders of science,
discoveries and the appreciation of the modern intellect of human beings. The linear,
America and continued to his education there. Apart from being a writer at Çocuk Sesi and Afacan, he
was the chief editor at the stanbul Chamber of Commerce: Çocuk Sesi, "Ahmet Ekrem Harmankaya,"
Çocuk Sesi, no. 397 (2 August 1937).
92 Ahmet Ekrem, "Darvin'in Masalı," Çocuk Sesi, no. 179 (5 June 1933): 10-13. See also Ahmet
Ekrem, "Simdiki nsan Oglu Kaç Yasındadır?," Çocuk Sesi, no. 175 (8 May 1933): 12. for his further
positive evaluations on Darwin.
63
modernist understanding of history made itself apparent in this piece, like in many
others of the period. He said, “today we are flying like birds, swimming like fish,
crossing the deserts, plains with lightning speed. Today’s human being is much more
intellectual than primitive man. Particularly in the last century, today’s human being
has progressed a lot in the way of knowledge and science. But maybe the differences
between us and the tomorrow’s human being will be much greater than the
differences between us and primitive men.”93
Logic, rationality and scientificism, which were important discourses in the
context of the Republican development and progress, were supported by a sensitive
secular appreciation of science and material knowledge against superstition and
metaphysics. Superstitious behaviour was equated with underdevelopment and when
this kind of information was presented to children, this was done with a discourse
sanctifying the intellect and logos of the human being. For example, in a piece
written by a writer signing himself as Hekimbası, who wrote a series about the health
of children, children were warned to drink milk for their health. He sanctified the
rules of nature that gave humans all of the animals and plants and appreciated the
great intellect of human being who challenged the nature and adapted nature to the
human being’s life: “If you ask old-fashioned people, they answer that “Allah created
all these (our food such as fish, sheep, chicken, egg etc) for us”. But, in fact, the
progress of our knowledge about nature has taught us the rules of it. And today we
know that these animals from whose flesh, eggs we are benefiting, were not created
93 “Bugün kus gibi havada uçuyor, balık gibi su içinde dolasıyor, yıldırım hızile çölleri, bozkırları
asıyoruz. Bununla beraber bugünkü insan ilk insandan çok bilgilidir. Hele son yüz yıl içinde ilim ve
fen yolunda çok ilerlemistir. Fakat yarının adamı yanında belki ilk insanla bizim aramızdaki
farklardan daha büyük farklar olacak“, Rakım Çalapala, "lk nsanlar Ve Biz," Cumhuriyet Çocugu,
no. 41 (1939): 290-93. See also a piece about the exhibition of primitive families living 20.000 years
ago, in Museum Buffalo in New-York."Meraklı Seyler/20.000 Sene Evvelki Dünya," Çocuk Sesi, no.
235 (25 June 1934): 12, “..Simdi bunları bir de bugünkü medeni sehirlerle bir ölçünüz, insanların
zekası, buluculugu ve o vakittenberi gösterdikleri terakkiye sahiden sasar, kalırsınız”.
64
for our pleasure. But as the people coped with everything with their intellect, they
beat the other animals in the world and tamed most of them.”94
In another passage in a piece related to the denigration of old habits and
superstitions of the Irish, the main point came at the end by finding these behavious
apparently silly and admiring the Turkish intellect, which was logical enough at
present when it was no longer possible to believe in such silly things. According to
this perception, the present was so developed that Turks could be proud of their
reason and intellect and laugh at all of the old habits and superstitions.95 This is why
the cartoon hero Cabi Katıltan asked so proudly in one of the cartoons about fortunetelling
in India that if there were any people poor of intellect believing silly things in
the Republican era.96 Of course, the answer was perceived to be no. The epoch was
the era of science, renewal, logical reason, scientificism and progress and in this
epoch there was no space for such “silly” beliefs which were equated with
“underdevelopment” in essence. What was expected from the child reading this, was
to feel the honour of that intellect and behave always within the boundaries of it.
When the honour and appreciation of positivist intellect merged with the
perception of disjunction from the past, it paved the way for despising the“old”
religious intellect and its representatives. There emerged ironic pieces in the
periodicals that made fun of imams and presented religious worship just an issue
about oppression between the lines by caricaturizing the Ottoman era. Two of Necdet
Rüstü’s stories written in the form of funny poems were interesting examples of this.
One of the stories took place in the Sultanate era at the time of Ramadan. At this
94 Hekimbası, "Tabiat Tetkik, Süt Biricik Tabii Bir Gıdadır," Çocuk Sesi, no. 203 (13 November
1933): 8.
95"Dünyada Neler Oluyor, Çok Yasamak çin Ne Lazım!,"Çocuk Sesi, no. 193(9 September 1933): 16.
96 "Cabi Katıltan Kayıptan Haber Veriyor!," Çocuk Sesi, no. 286 (17 June 1935): 3.
65
time, the Sultan announced that, whoever ate something in the street, would be
imprisoned and beaten in a dark jail. The people were described as very fearful of
this announcement in the story. Two Muslims named Hasan and Hüseyin did not fast
and one day were so hungry that they ate something in the street. They were caught
by the zaptiehs, arrested and taken in front of the ranking police officer. The story
continued: Hüseyin lied about his religion and saved himself by saying he was a Jew.
He left, but came back to save his friend, Hasan, by saying that he had found Islam
so trustworthy that he had changed his religion and converted to Islam and wanted
the zaptiehs to free Hasan as a gift for this merit. The Zaptiehs forgave Hasan and the
two friends left happily. The story ended with the lines that: “What an
oppression/The Sultanate’s was/How lucky we are/The Republic saved us.”97
Another story took place in one of the villages in the Republican era. It was
ironic especially in terms of its characters. The story was based on a duality between
an intelligent and slightly crazy man who was liked by the peasants a lot and was
called as kahya by them and an imam, swearing at modernization and preaching
against it in the village, deceiving the uneducated peasants and threatening them with
going to hell.98
In this context, the kahya always became angry with the imam and said to
him “You must escape/from ignorance, narrow-mindedness/you must open the
eyes/of those poor peasants/ıf the peasants/don’t be adopted to modernization/then
97 “ste Saltanat halka/Böyle cefa yapardı!../Bizi bu cefalardan/Cumhuriyet Kurtardı!..”, Necdet
Rüstü, "Hem Müslüman, Hem Yahudi!/Çocuk Sesinin Sen Öyküleri," Çocuk Sesi, no. 313 (23
December 1935): 8-9.
98 The peasants were drawn very close to Yakup Kadri’s ignorant peasants in Yaban: Yakup Kadri
Karaosmanoglu, Yaban, (stanbul: letisim Yayınları, 1997).
66
by the coming enemy/your neck will be blown!”99 The story continued with these
two men’s struggle and in the end, of course, the kahya representing the modern,
secular, scientific reason won by warning the peasants reasonably and intelligently
using his wits. The imam was forced to run away from the village. The story ended
with the lines, “the peasants behaving sensibly from then on/Opened their eyes and
the spurious imam/ran away in the Republican dawn!”100 The victor was the intellect
of the establishment, represented in the reason of kahya and the peasants to follow
him.
The reason for kahya being the one that adopted the Western Reason of the
Republic rapidly is a parallel sign of the alluded disjunction from the Ottoman past
mentioned earlier in this part. The Ottoman past in the stories was equated with a
false-consciousness of superstition and narrow-minded reasoning of religious
discourse against the progressive science, technology and modern reasoning that
advocated searching for material evidence in truth.101
99“Sen cehaletten/Yalandan kaçmalısın/Zavalı köylülerin/Gözünü açmalısın/Eger medeniyete/
Uymazsa bu köylüler/Düsman gelir, bu sefer/Senin boynunu keser!..”, Necdet Rüstü, "Camideki
Kurt/Çocuk Sesinin Sen Öyküleri," Çocuk Sesi, no. 335 (25 May 1936): 18-19.
100 “Akıllanan köylüler/Artık gözünü açtı/Cumhuriyet Devrinde/Sahte mam da kaçtı!”, ibid.
101 The issue of disjunction from the past and secularism and the resistance moments such as
conservative modernism is a much broader one in Turkish political and cultural history. But
summarizing the debates on Western modernity, science, technology, intuition and modern
conservatist thinking against the common-sense positivistic affiliations in the Republican Era is
beyond the scope of my study which just aims to show the illusions and metaphors embedded in these
debates served to children in the popular children’s periodicals of the time.
67
Çocuk Sesi, no. 215 (5 February 1934).
Progress, Discoveries in Far Away Lands and Adventure Stories
The above picture102 is a good example giving the clues of the common-sense
perception of progress and its relation to children. The modern boy and girl, the sun,
the planes, monuments of the Republic, the factories, the railways are not just simple
pictures drawn but are illusions of the dissemination of the honour in the
achievements of the Republican era in its last ten years given to children in the
simplest form. The news about the “hugely” growing economy, paper, glass, textile
102 Çocuk Sesi, no. 215 (5 February 1934).
68
factories that were opened; bridges that were constructed; current news about the
railways, the increasing number of schools opened were always supported with
pictures and statistical information.103 The legitimization of this hysterical
narcissisim of the Republican progress in the periodicals was embedded in one
important sentence focusing on the sacrified present: “It is the path of this era to
progress with huge steps in the way of the civilization.”104
But there is also one very important thing between the lines in the picture; it
is the desire to reach more and more knowledge and science; the boundaries of the
brain and intellect seem so hungry to discover further things in order to take further
steps in the route of modern civilization. More books should be read, more places
should be seen. But what this means is, very roughly, in fact a colonial perception of
the world stemming from the desire of progress. The secular desire rising on the
shoulders of positivistic desire to learn more and more about the material world
which is made an object of discovery and wonder paves the way for symbolizing
103 See "Cumhuriyet Devrinde 10 Yıllık lerleme," Çocuk Sesi, no. 201 (29 October 1933): 19-20. and
"On Besinci Yıl," Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 1 (1938): 1-4. In this first issue, Cumhuriyet Çocugu
opened on the front page with a comparison of the Ottoman and Republican Industries where the
writer whose signature we don’t see, tried to show the “hugely” growing economy and industrial
developments. See also, “11 Yıllık Cumhuriyette Yeni Yeni Mektepler Açıldı. Seker, Dokuma, Cam,
Yün, plik, Süt, Kömür, Sabun Fabrikalarının Kimisi Genisledi, Kimisinin Temeli Atıldı, Demir
Agları Memleketi Bastan Basa Sardı. Ordumuz Dünyanın En Kuvvetli Bir Ordusu Haline Getirildi”,
Çocuk Sesi, no. 253 (29 October 1934): 18-19; “Demir Yollarımız Genisliyor, Bu Hafta
Demiryollarımız Sivas, rganiden Uzayarak Sevinç ile Diyarıbekire Girdi, Artık stanbuldan Kalkınca
Dogu Sınırlarımıza Kadar Gidecegiz. Bu Günler de Yaklastı”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 309 (25 November
1935) : 3; “Cumhuriyetimizin Yeni Zaferi, Afyondan Karakuyuya ve Bozanönünden Ispartaya 127
Kilometrelik Demir Agı Çekildi”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 327 (30 March 1936) : 3; “Türk Ulusunun Elinden
Her s Gelir, Dört Günde Dört Fabrikadan kisinin Temeli Atıldı, kisi se Basladı”, Çocuk Sesi, no.
310 (2 December 1935): 3; “Türk Kusu, 11 Uçaktan Birlesmis Olan Türk Kusu Filomuz 11 Haziran
Günü Ankaradan Hareket Ederek Büyük Bir Yurt Gezisine Çıktı”, Cumhuriyet Çocugu, vol. 2, no. 35
(1939): 163.
104 “Japonlar ve nüfusları: Gazetelerde okuyorsunuz; Japonlar Çinlilerle hemen her gün harp
etmektedirler. Bunun sebebi memleketlerinin kendilerine dar gelmesi ve baska yerlerde vatan
aramalarıdır. Gerçi, Çinliler dünyanın en büyük nüfusuna malik iseler de pek geri olmalarından
dolayıdır ki 67 milyon nüfusu olan Japonya ile bile basa çıkamamak tadır. MEDENYETTE DEV
ADIMLAR LE LERLEMEK BU ASRIN YOLUDUR. Bu yolda yürümeyenlerin akıbeti baska
milletlerin esiri olmaktır. Biz de çok çalısalım ve imperialist devletlerin boyunduruguna geçmeyelim”,
"Resimle Devrialem/ Japonlar Ve Nüfusları," Çocuk Sesi, no. 155 (19 December 1932): 10-11.
69
progress with a colonial gaze. Looking for the roots of adventure in the social context
takes us to the transformations in the social realm since the Industrial Revolution.
As Sealander reminds, “for the first time in history, the Industrial Revolution
allowed tens of millions of ordinary people, mostly Europeans, to travel the globe
seeking employment or adventure. Americans made folk heroes of the man on the
move-the wanderer-the Huck Finn quick to abandon civilization and light out for the
territories.”105 The world was perceived as an open space from then on and the
literary figures rapidly accomponied this soul of adventure that people continued to
read any time. Martin Travers makes a valuable analysis regarding the contested
literature in Germany in the Nazi period where he wants to challenge the
misrepresentation of the scope and extent of Nazi control on literature based on a
wrong perception of all-pervasive ideology and a total control of the nation: he puts
forward the fact that the range of everyday literature material including adventure
stories exhibiting no evident concern for political policies but just having a diverting,
entertaining or amusing function in the Nazi period was enormous.106 The adults
were already reading these pieces before children.
The march and adventures towards the unknown lands began on a
“reasonable” desire of discovery while it continued with categorizing and
“otherizing” the people mostly living in the East. How was it told? It was told
through the stories about the voyages and adventures of Turkish scientists, engineers,
doctors, boyscouts to far places in the East which were mostly perceived as
belonging to the “barbarians”. The head of the Turks represented in the periodicals
looked at “West” smiling while it strenghtened its power by travelling to those far
105 Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003):10.
106 Martin Travers, "Politics and Canonicity: Constructing Literature in the Third Reich," in The
Attractions of Fascism, ed. John Milfull (Munich: Berg, 1990): 43-44.
70
“underdeveloped”, “primitive” lands in the “East”. The Turkish child should feel
lucky in these adventures as the powerful subject in comparison to the primitive and
usually black barbarian. Civilization beat the East in this sense in most of the
adventures with all its false essentialist and culturalist categorizations reifying the
East and the West. The West was perceived mostly to categorize European countries;
how was the East pictured by this desire of colonialist gaze then?
In Other Lands: LIBERIA, The Weird Country of the Black Skinned107, In
Weird Lands: The Fortune of the World: EGYPT108; Weird Lands: Arabia109; From
Weird Countries of the World: India, The Land of Tigers and Snakes110, The Leopard
Hunting in India111, An Adventure in Africa112etc. These are the titles of some
informative writings about the other places in the world and adventure stories
published in Çocuk Sesi. Pertaining to the informative writings, they were written
mostly as rough anthropological texts trying to give information about those people
far away in the East living so differently. Some points included in these pieces were
the religious superstititions of Indians; the weird habits of Indian fakirs such as
burying themselves under the soil, whose reasons according to Çocuk Sesi could not
yet be discovered by those European doctors thinking about these for a long time; the
bedouins’ lives; exotic jewels, long caravans in deserts; the magical carpets of
Baghdad and the black skinned Liberian child playing with monkeys. As seen, what
107 "Baska Memleketlerde, Lberya, Kara Tenlilerin Acaip Ülkesi," Çocuk Sesi, no. 344 (27 July
1936):11.
108 "Garip Memleketlerde, Dünyanın Hazinesi Mısır," Çocuk Sesi, no. 343 (20 July 1936): 11.
109 "Garip Memleketler: Arabistan," Çocuk Sesi, no. 347 (17 July 1936): 11.
110 "Dünyanın Garip Memleketlerinden: Kaplan Ve Yılanlar Diyarı Hindistan," Çocuk Sesi, no. 341 (6
July 1936): 11.
111 “Hindistan’da Pars Avı”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 499 (17 July 1939): 2.
112 “Afrika’da Bir Macera”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 506 (4 September 1939): 8.
71
was presented to the imagination of the Turkish child reader was a mixture of
exoticism and pride about being a “normal” white-skinned in a “developing”,
“progressing” country in the world civilization. The Turkish child was expected to
read the pieces and look at the drawn maps of these contained geographic spaces
enthusiastically and with great surprise.
Progress merged with a great ambition of discovery which paved the way to
identifying and categorizing the discovered objects from a suppressing power
position.. Turkish scientists, doctors, engineers, travellers, journalists, young students
and little Turkish child heroes were presented as great discoverers of those lands far
away in some stories and cartoons in the periodicals. These adventurous stories and
cartoons mostly were set in exotic forests, deserts, among “the barbarians, cannibal
blacks and big animals”. Some titles from the stories were illuminating in terms of
their content in this respect: Discoverer Tulgar is in the Indian Forests, the
Adventures of Young Turkish Hunters in Barbarian Lands and Yaman and Duman
Are in the Lands of the Machine Men113 about two boyscouts’ adventures in Egypt
among the old Egyptians. Other popular pieces were closer to rough science fiction;
in the arms of development, progress, science and machines such as Dr. Dolittle and
His Animals, translated from abroad by Sezai Attila, The Iron Men of Doctor Haks,
Scientific Novel Belonging to the Future114, Crazy Dogan115 and World Race in
Dangers.116 Jules Verne seems to affect the writers very much in this period.117 In
113 “Bilgin Tulgar Hint Ormanlarında, Vahsi Ülkelerde Genç Türk Avcılarının Serüvenleri”,
"Yamanla Duman Makineli Adamlar Ülkesinde," Çocuk Sesi, no. 297 (1935).
114 "Doktor "Haks"ın Demirden Adamları, stikbale Ait Fenni Roman," Çocuk Sesi, no. 154 (12
December 1932).
115 Sezai Attila, "Deli Dogan/Büyük Milli Roman," Çocuk Sesi, no. 397 (1937).
116 "Tehlikeler çinde Dünya Yarısı/Birinci Bölüm: Küçük Kahraman," Çocuk Sesi, no. 362 (1936).
72
fact these subjects of discovery and adventure are valid for most of the children’s
literature in all eras. But what distinguishes the context of the Republic in the 1930s
and 1940s lies in fact that, the ideological implications of such stories in the nationstate
formation process would not be immune from categorizing the world in
civilized people and others. This would not remain as a naive literary desire because
the metaphors in the narratives were intertwined with other metaphors of the nationstate
in the public realm. When a child saw the picture of a smiling nönü, the picture
of a microscope and the picture of black-skinned following each other in the
periodical, his maps of meaning would not be immune from perceiving adventure on
the same level with a discourse of civilization as revived in his imagination with the
earlier metaphors he gained.
When we are talking about the stories in the East, we can say that the Turkish
discoverers and heroes were always the ones winning the battles in these exotic lands
after many risks and dangers. For example, in one story published in Çocuk Sesi in
1935, two journalists from a significant journal in Turkey took a great risk and
wanted to go to India to report on a mystical and dangerous tariqat. These two
“Turkish heroes” travelled to India with great enthusiasm to learn the secrets behind
the Merravi Tariqat, which belonged to the Indian Fakirs.118
117 In 1935, a teacher had written a critique letter to Aptullah Ziya Kozanoglu and had criticized him
that his heroes in the nationalist epic stories were illogicall characters. The severe answer of
Kozanoglu was published in Çocuk Sesi where he advocated his heroes and said that heroism could
not combine in any case with logic. He compared Ahmet Cevdet’s A Turk in Europe with Jules
Verne’s books and wrote that if a book of journey was so real, it would be like Ahmet Cevdet’s book,
no one rould read it. But if it relied on imaginative power, it would be like Jules Verne’s books which
were read by everyone even then throughout the world. “Seyahat romanı hakiki olursa Ahmet
Cevdetin (Avrupada Bir Türk) kitabına benzer, kimse okumaz. Hayale dayanırsa Jül Vern’in
kitaplarına benzer, bütün dünya bugün bile elden bırakmaz”, Kozanoglu Abdullah Ziya, “Bayan
Ögretmen Sadiye Yavuzere Açık Mektup”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 289 (8 July 1935): 5.
118 “Fakir adını elbette isitmissinizdir. Bunlar türlü türlü büyücülük oyunları yapan Hintlilerdir. Hele
Merravi fakirleri Hindistanın en yaman ve korkulacak adamlarıdır. Bizim Çelikyürekle, Demirgögüs
Hindistana varır varmaz, yapmak istedikleri sorusturmanın ne kadar güç olacagını anlamakta
çekinmediler”, "Fakirlerin Tutsakları," Çocuk Sesi, no. 288 (1 July 1935): 8-9.
73
Nevertheless, the story went on with the herosim of these two great Turkish
journalists. They were subjected to a great physical torture by the members of this
tariqat. Interestingly, the scenes of torture were visualized for children by photos
where the two journalists were hanged by the arms from the ceiling and shouted
badly because of the pain from which they suffered.119 The adrenaline in the story
was provided from this expression of violence which was in fact a general feature of
most of the nationalist children’s stories and cartoons in the periodicals of the time
where marks of pain, murder, blood and violence were used very comfortably
although the texts targeted at the children. This was an important point while we are
rendering the hysteria of nationalist discourse, which was not unique to the Turkish
experience. All nationalisms use violence for legitimization and this is an important
step in the way towards the “otherization” process. In the context of the 1930s
children’s periodicals, Aptullah Ziya Kozanoglu’s stories about the herosim of old
Turkish tribes against the Chinese were very important pieces in terms of the usage
of apparent violence in publications for children.
These two Turkish journalists symbolized civilization here. They went
discovering the East because they could not go West; if they had, then the story
would have been not about heroism, but one of inferiority. The power relationship
would have been turned vice versa then. The two faces of pride and inferiority acted
together in the nationalist discourse. Being in the West was not something to be
appreciated when talking about the great Turkish history with its roots in Central
Asia, but being in the West became an identity desired to be owned when positioning
the self against the Fakirs of India and Blacks of Africa. The two Turkish journalists
went to the East with a feeling of going from the West; but not from the “West” of
119 “ki Türk gazetecisi kollarından tavana asılarak iskence görüyor, bu acıya dayanamıyorlardı”. Ibid.
74
the East as a geographical meaning; they went from the “West” in a civilizational
sense.
In a cartoon in one of the early issues of Çocuk Sesi, a boy scout named
Afacan travelled to Africa with his ship. He was pictured as a genius sailor boy from
the navy. He wanted to wander around the desert and while he was wandering,
suddenly an African apppered in front of him. We understand from the cartoon that
the African was a child, but he was drawn like a creature much more than a human
being and this visualization of black people especially seemed to be valid for most of
the publications of the period: big limbs, naked body, a ring in the nose, a creature
drawn like a monkey. The black boy had a knife in his hand, but he seemed so weak
compared with the clean, white clothes of the Turkish boy scout and his confidence
in himself and cunning with a sarcastic smile on his mouth. Nevertheless “our”
Afacan did many genius acts such as throwing coconuts at the African boy, who was
written to be a “primitive and cannibal”120 and was beaten by every act of Afacan.
The final blow aganist the African boy became the lighter of Afacan, by which he
burned the hair of the African boy who had to run away with pain. What Afacan did
at the end was to pose with pride and that sarcastic smile on his mouth. The child is
taught to be always powerful and self-confident against others beginning from the
childhood and Afacan is a good example in terms of this, of those who strenghten
their power consuming the image of a “naturally” inferior being: “the primitive,
barbarian and canibal negro boy”.121
It was the same tendency eight years later, too: In 1938, in a story in
Cumhuriyet Çocugu, Mr Dündar, a rich trademan of Turkey took his family with him
120 "Afacan Yamyamlar Memleketinde," Çocuk Sesi, no. 31 (20 January 1930): 3.
121 The story ended with these words: “Bizim su bahriyeli Afacan’ın deminki korkusuna bedel hele su
gülüsüne bir bakınız. Kırkbir kere masallah.“ Ibid.
75
on a journey to Africa where his children found themselves on an adventure in a
barbarian village of theAfricans.122
In another piece, a Turkish traveller went to make a movie about pygmies in
Africa, which is said to seek this barbarousness far away where Africa becomes a
geographical object for children.123 In another one, cannibalism was drawn as a
feature of these primitive people whom the great colonizers tried to educate and
civilize to make them give up these habits: “The nations colonializing Africa try to
make these men give up their cannibalism. The cannibalist cases still continue
although they are few. There are such half-cannibals in the world that they eat just
the hearts and brains of the humans they kill. As seen for ages, cannibalism is just
unique to some negro tribes. Never and nowhere has it been seen that the white men
eat each other.”124 But very interestingly, just one year after this piece, in another
piece the great development and progress of Africa was mentioned, but without
losing the colonial gaze:
South Africa is a country that has changed at a bewildering speed. 50
years ago, just hero men could come here who could take their life in
their hands. The country was full of bloodthirsty animals, barbarians
122 "Ormanların Çocugu, Bir Serüven Hikayesi," Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 29 (1938): 56-57.
123 “Maksadımız, Orta Kongo mıntıkasında yasamakta olan Pygmen cücelerini görmek ve bir çok
rivayetleri, masalları ile kulaklarımızı doslddurmus olan bu vahsilerin yasayıslarını, gündelik
hayatlarını filme çekmekti..En eski insanlar gibi bugün tamamile iptidai yasayan Pygmen cüce
zencilerini Kongonun simali sarkısındaki asırlık ormanlar içinde görmek, filme çekmek üstüva hattı
mıntıkasında yasamakta olan bu vahsiligi tetkik etmek fena bir sey degildi...“, "Cüceler Ve Orman
Devleri-Afrika'nın Korkunç Karanlıkları çinde Film Çeviriyoruz, Afrika'da Film Çeken Bir Seyyahın
Hatıraları, Maceralar çinde-1," Çocuk Sesi, no. 151 (21 November 1932): 4-5.
124 “Afrikayı idareleri altında tutan milletler bu adamları insan eti yemek sevdasından vazgeçirmege
çalısmaktadırlar. Ara sıra görülen yamyamlık vakalarının bugün hala arkası alınamamıstır...Dünya
yüzünde bir de yarı yamyamlar vardır ki bunların kimisi öldürdükleri düsmanın beynini, kimisi de
sade kalbini yemekle iktifa ederler. Görülüyor ki eskidenberi insan eti yemek yalnız zenci kabilelere, o
da bir kısmına mahsus bir seydir. Hiç bir zaman ve hiç bir yerde beyaz insanların birbirlerini
yediklerine dair ne bir iz, ne de bir esere tesadüf olunmustur“.Necat Aziz, "Eski Beyaz nsanlarda
Yamyamlık Var Mıydı, Bugünkü Dünyanın Yamyam Diyarı Neresidir?," Çocuk Sesi, no. 242 (13
August 1934): 6-7. For other pieces about categorization of esp. Africa and India, see "Zencilerle
Hayvanların Kavgası-1/Aylık Resimli Hikaye," Çocuk Sesi, no. 151 (21 November 1932): 2.; A. Naci,
"Ölüm Korkusu," Çocuk Sesi, no. 227 (30 April 1934): 14-15.; "Kırmızı Derili Vahsilerin Bas
Tuvaletleri Ve Evleri," Çocuk Sesi, no. 175 (8 May 1933): 6-7.
76
and deserts impossibel to traverse. Now this place is sull of green
grassy plains and pastures where cattle graze. Great cities with the
latest fashion are constructed around the diamond mines. In these
cities having the most contemporary avenues and high apartments,
there are unbelieveable scenes. Here it is the black-faced native,
walking on the street with his lion chained...Look at that vivacious
huge woman; maybe going to meet her fiance...There are such girls
dressed due to the latest fashion that while wandering in the evenings,
sometimes stop and gossip..On this side, the latest fashion buildings;
on the other side, such strange clothing and scenes; sounds weird?125
All of the above examples take us to the same point of the colonialist
discourse that is positioned by barbarizing some and internalizing the other. The
abstracted dichotomy of the East and West does nothing more than to serve the
interests of orientalism and occidentalism by the reification of the East and the West
in the culturally essentialist sense, but this essentialist discourse in the periodicals
was repeated enough to shape the route of a child’s memory with the big lipped,
monkey-like black-skinned people and the great desire of beating the environment,
the forests, the deserts, the barbarians and in a sense, owning the environment. The
East was constructed as a property in the child’s imagination after its discovery. In
children’s periodicals, stories of adventure and progress served colonialism in this
sense.
125 “Cenubi Afrika sasılacak hızla degismis bir ülkedir. Bundan 50 yıl once buraya ancak kellesini
koltuguna alabilen en yigit kisiler gidebilirdi. Ülkenin içi bastan basa yırtıcı hayvanlar, yabani
insanlar, asılmaz çöllerle dolu idi. Burası simdi yemyesil ovalar, sürü sürü sıgır ve davar yetistiren
genis otlaklar olmustur. Elmas madenlerinin çevrelerinde son moda büyük sehirler kurulmustur. Koca
koca apartmanlı, genis caddeli bu asri sehirlerde sizin ve benim inanamayacagımız manzaralar eksik
degildir. ste yüzü kapkara bir yerli, elinde tuttugu zincire baglı arslanla sokaklarda dolasıyor…Hele
su boylu poslu yerli YOSMASINA bakın: Yanıbasında yürüyen Gepardla belki de nisanlasile
bulusmaga gidiyor…Bazı son modaya gore giyinmis kızlar vardır ki sehrin sokaklarında aksam
gezintisi yaparken, durup biraz da dedikodulu laflar ederler. Bir taraftan en son moda apartıman, öte
yandan da böyle tuhaf tuhaf kılıklar göze acaip görünüyor degil mi?” "Cenubi Afrika Tuhaflıklar
Ülkesidir!..." Çocuk Sesi, no. 269 (18 February 1935): 9.
77
Children and the Images of Political Socialization During the 1930s
As underlined previously, we can not think of a childhood devoid of the
political and social context of the society. Children of a specific era grow up with the
specific needs, expectations, burdens and the perceptions that era load them. The
society reflects the political aura of an era through its children.
In this respect, for the context of the 1930s Turkey, the images of political
socialization for children in children’s periodicals were generally shaped around the
efforts to contiune the hegemony of one-party regime. Most of the pieces written in
mainstream periodicals during these years aimed to integrate children to nation-state
politics under the leadership of Republican People’s Party. The news about the
development and progress of the country went hand in hand with the images exalting
the party, the government and the state which were declared to be unified in 16 June
1936 by smet nönü’s printed notice.
In 1930s, there were at most two political figures who were almost regarded
as sacred in mainstream children’s periodicals; Mustafa Kemal and smet nönü.
After 1938, the death of Mustafa Kemal and the strenghtening of smet nönü’s
power as the “National Chief”, the image of nönü started to take more place in the
pages.
In 18 September 1933, Çocuk Sesi published a questionnaire that aimed to
measure the love of children to Atatürk and their knowledge about him. There were
questions in the questionnaire such as, “Have you ever seen the Ghazi? Where did
you first see him? Whatv did you feel? How was your enthusiasm and excitement?,
Have you ever heard the Ghazi making a public speech?..How does Ghazi talk?
78
What kind of feelings does he give birth to in your hearts?, Have you got any poems
written about the Ghazi? Tell about the flattering in your heart about the Ghazi..”126
The image of Mustafa Kemal was very strong and every time it was reminded
to children that, they were indebted to him. The Republican Regime was equated
with Mustafa Kemal and loving Mustafa Kemal was the first measure for children in
terms of showing their commitment to the regime.127 But after Atatürk’s death in
1938, the speeches and the advices of smet nönü both to Turkish society and
children covered more place in the periodicals.128
Apart from portraying really strong images of Mustafa Kemal and smet
nönü, the most important tools for political socialization in the periodicals were
poems and writings exalting the one-party regime, the institutions of the state from
military to government posts, the responsibility of paying taxes, joining the military
and the responsibility of being aware of the duties of every citizen towards the state.
The responsibilities of the state were perceived at most within the boundaries of
providing order and development in the country unified as an organ with its police,
gendarme, doctors, soldiers and bureaucrats. Especially in the Fest of 23, some
126 “Gaziyi gördünüz mü? lk defa nerede gördünüz? çinizde neler duydunuz, heyecan ve taskınlıgınız
nasıldı?, Gaziyi nutuk söylerken hiç dinlediniz mi?Gazi nasıl söz söyler, sesi, sözleri sizde neler
uyandırır?, Gazi hakkında yazılmıs siirleriniz var mı? Hulasa, Gazinin hayatı, Gazinin kkalbinizdeki
çırpıntısını anlatınız.“ Büyük Gazi ve Küçükler kitabında, sizin de düsündüklerinizin bulunmasını
isterseniz hemen bize bir cevap veriniz“, Çocuk Sesi, no. 195 (18 September 1933): 2. See also
“Atatürk Florya Plajında”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 291, (22 July 1935): 15.
127 While commenting on the role of Atatürk’s image in political life in Turkey, Hasan Önder calls
Kemalism as the civil religion, and Mustafa Kemal as the prophet of this religion. Hasan Önder,
“Atatürk mgesinin Siyasal Yasamdaki Rolü”, Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düsünce-Kemalizm,
(stanbul: letisim Yayınları, 2001): 151-152.
128 “Cumhurbaskanımız smet nönü”, Cumhuriyet Çocugu, vol. 1, no. 3 (12 October 1938): 54-55;.
“smet nönü, Üç Mükemmel Çocugun ve Bütün Türk Çocuklarının Sevgili Babası”, Çocuk, Special
Edition, (29 October 1939); “smet nönü Bir Halk Çocugudur”, ibid; “nönü Çocukları-Küçük
Hikaye”, Çocuk, no. 224 (15 March 1941): 5.
79
"smet nönü, Üç Mükemmel Çocugun ve Bütün Türk Çocuklarının Sevgili Babası"
Çocuk, Special Edition, (29 October 1939)
80
children were chosen as symbolic representatives of these state posts and the
hegemony of the state was strengthened in the eyes of children.129
One of the other ways to integrate children to nation-state politics was
designing a geographic perception of Turkey in children’s minds. Geography was a
significant tool that helped the country be imagined in children’s minds as the land of
beauties. There were a lot of pieces telling about both the geographic and political
virtues of Ankara and the other Anatolian cities.130
But there were two important spheres about which the children were warned
much in terms of the political life of Turkey. The first were the warnings to children
about the consumption of native goods and saving money for future both for the self
and for the sake of the country as the investments the children had saved would
contribute to the economy of Turkey.131
The second sphere was, reminding children the significance of the census for
the sake of the country. As will be discussed later in the third chapter about the
significance of motherhood and pro-natalist policies, the Republic had entered an era
when most of the healthy, working male population had been lost during the Balkan,
The First World and Independence Wars, population exchanges and migrations. In
129 “Vali Çocuk”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 226 (23 April 1934): 4-5; H.. Yurdseven, “Bütçe- Yurt Bilgisi,
Erdem’in Kosuglarından”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 269 (18 February 1935): 7; H.. Yurdseven, “Basbakanlık-
Yurt Bilgisi”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 270 (25 February 1935) : 8; H.. Yurdseven, “Bakanlıklar-Yurt Bilgisi
Kosuglarından: 8”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 273 (18 March 1935): 8; H.. Yurdseven, “Yurddasa Karsı
Devletin Ödevleri”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 290 (15 July 1935) :11; H.. Yurdseven, “Vergi Vermek Ödevi”,
Çocuk Sesi, no. 292 (29 July 1935): 15, H.. Yurdseven, “Askerlik Ödevi-Yurt Bilgisi Siirleri”, Çocuk
Sesi, no. 296 (26 August 1935) : 10, C.Ç. Ögretmeni, “Askerlik ve Ordumuz”, Cumhuriyet Çocugu,
vol. 2, no. 26 (1939): 470; H. . Akçam, “Tek Parti”, Çocuk, no. 134 (14 April 1939): 2, “Bir Yıllık
Yurt Bilgisi Derslerine Bir Kusbakısı”, Çocuk, no. 135 (23 April 1939): 32-33.
130 See for example, “Ankarada Yolculuk, Türkiyenin Kalbi Ankarada Çarpar”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 305
(28 October 1935): 10-11 and Gezgin, “Memleketimiz Vandan Hasab’a Kadar”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 319
(3 February 1936) : 3, “Yesil Edirne-Güzel Türkiye”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 358 (9 November 1936) :6.
131 “Yerli Mallar Revüsü, Bir Perdelik Piyes”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 207 (11 December 1933) : 3; “Tasarruf
Haftası”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 364 (14 December 1936): 6; Latif Öktem, “Yerli Mallar Savası”,
Cumhuriyet Çocugu, vol. 1, no. 7 (14 December 1938): 104-105.
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the first census of the Republic in 1927, it was estimated by the statistics that the
population had decreased by %20 from 1924 till 1927.132 The Republican state at
first focused on policies to increase the population and compensate this rapid decline
by pro-natalist policies that encouraged state-led marriages and the birth of many
children for the progress of the Turkish nation-state.
The census of 20 October 1935 was very significant in terms of the policies
aiming at the rapid increase of population and this was reflected in children’s
periodicals, too. The children were warned about the significance of the census:
Children, the rise of a nation and her progress among the other
nations is only provided with the abundance of her population. A
nation whose population decreases from day-to-day or makes no
increase, loses her prestige and other nations take her place in
time…So that, we are all working to increase our population by
increasing the fertility rates and decreasing the death rates. Children,
during the Ottoman era, in our vast lands reaching over to the West
from the East, to the South from the North, population was not
considered significant. The colonialist states immediately put their
eyes on lands having low population. Now it will be by the greatness
of our population that we will take their eyes off whoever put their
eyes on our nation. By our population, we will block the wishes of
imperialist states.133
As it is seen from the above points, the Republic cared a lot about informing
her children of the political issues and the political routes of the country. The general
aim was to remind children that they belonged to the Turkish nation-stateand warn
them about their duties starting from their childhood on.
132 “Genç Cumhuriyetin lk Nüfus Sayımı”, Cumhuriyet Ansiklopedisi 1923-2000, vol. 1: 1923-1940,
(stanbul: YKY, 2003): 97.
133 “Çocuklar, bir ulusun yükselmesi, öteki uluslardan daha ileriye gitmesi ancak nüfusunun çoklugu
ile olur. Günden güne azalan, yerinde sayan bir ulus, günden güne de düser, onun yerini baska
uluslar kaplar…Biz de nüfusumuzun çoogalmasına, dogumların artmasına, ölenlerin azalmasına
çalısıyoruz…Çocuklar, Osmanlı hükümeti zamanında dogudan batıya, kuzeyden güneye dogru uzanan
uçsuz bucaksız topraklarımızda nüfusa hiç önem verilmemisti. Nüfussuz, insansız memleketlere
(emperyalist) yani sömürgeci, müstemlekeci devletler hemen göz koyarlar ve o yerleri ellerine
geçirmek isterler. Nüfusumuzun çoklugiledir ki yurdumuza göz dikenlerin gözlerini çıkaracagız.
Nüfusumuzun çoklugiledir ki emperyalist devletlerin dileklerine sed çekecegiz.”, “20 lktesrin Pazar
Günü Yurdumuzun Her Tarafında kinci Genel Nüfus Sayımı Yapılacaktır!..O gün Nüfusumuzun ne
bir eksik, en bir artık kaç milyon kisi oldugunu kesin olarak anlıyacagız”, Çocuk Sesi, no. 302 (7
October 1935): 3.
82
The Onset of the Second World War and the Turkish Boy Scouts
The memories of children living in war conditions are filled with images that
are too difficult to forget. The Second World War paved the way to great devastation
in the countries attended the war. William M. Tuttle makes a significant analysis in
terms of the war time children regarding American children’s lives: “Children’s
wartime experiences often placed them in adult situations, which reinforced both
strengths and vulnerabilities. Bolstering personal growth during the wat, children
took on additional responsibilities. As the older siblings either left home to join the
service or took war-production jobs, their younger sisters and brothers assumed
household responsibilities”134
Turkey did not attend the Second World War but could not be immune to the
international effects especially in terms of the hard socio-economic problems during
the war years. Even the economic problems of the periodicals reflected in their pages
especially in terms of the lack of paper was an evidence of the hard socio-economic
conditions during the war and the children’s periodicals were announcing to their
readers that they had to sacrifice from the number of their pages.135 The effects of
these problems in children’s periodicals in terms of the visibility of poverty is the
issue of the second chapter. In this part, I just want to show how the Second World
134 William M. Tuttle, Jr, “Age, Culture and History” in “Daddy’s Gone to War” The Second World
War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 241. See also his
another article about the experience of American children in the Second World War from a crossdisciplinary
research of psychology and history: William M. Tuttle, Jr, “America’s Home Front
Children in World War II” In Children in Time and Place, Developmental and Historical Insights, ed.
Glenn H. Elder, Jr, John Modell, Ross D. Parke, (New York. Cambridge University Press, 1993): 27-
46.
135 “Sevgili Okurlar”, Cumhuriyet Çocugu, vol. 2, no. 46 (1939): 387; Çocuk, no. 173 (22 January
1940): 3.
83
War became a tool for reminding Turkish children their particular responsibilities in
war years as today’s boyscouts and tomorrow’s soldiers especially with reference to
Çocuk .
While the Second World War continued, some news writings and
photographs about the War were published in Çocuk. The general aim of these pieces
was to show children the lesson they should take from the War. The most
emphasized subject was solidarity during war time which attributed children some
duties. There were stories about solidarity and heroism of children during war
time.136 But, there were also real stories from the ongoing war. For example, in one
of the issues, an example from China under the invasion of Japan was given. The
Chinese children abroad had prepared an exhibition “while their fathers were fighting
in the War” and Çocuk published photographs form the exhibition and appreciated
their work much in terms of the support they were giving to the struggle of their
country. Also, Cumhuriyet Çocugu had compared the children of China and Japan in
misery with the children of other countries who were getting ready happily to the
coming Christmas.137
It was told children that the wars from then on were total wars where the war
did not just continue on the front but on the back front, too. In this respect, “there is
work to do for children at the back front of the war. These children living in the
conditions of war, pay their debts to the country either by getting involved in farming
or directly within the military but in any case by filling the emptied spaces of adults.
136 Nezihe Araz, “ki Candan Arkadas”, Çocuk, no. 159 (6 October 1939): 14; Cevdet Demiray,
“Cepheye Kosan Çocuk”, Çocuk, no. 183 (1 April 1940): 8.
137 “Resimler ve Haritalar ile Dünya Haberleri”, Çocuk, no. 159 (6 October 1939): 12; “1939a
Girerken Dünya Çocukları”, Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 10 (4 January 1939).
84
The Turkish child knows well more than everyone what he should do both at the
front and backfront when required in war.”138
At the same time there were writings of informative pieces teaching children
some practical informations that could be needed in war times such as how it was
possible to prevent from airplane assaults or what kinds of poisonous gases
existed.139
In fact, through these writings the mind of the child was getting used to the
idea of the “war”. It was expected from children to be aware of their responsibilities
in war conditions. It was reflected from the periodicals that, they were the “future
soldiers of the nation” and this was why they had to be serious about these warnings.
In terms of this, the virtues of boy scouting were told at length for pages in most of
the issues during the War years. Because, the boy scout was attributed the role of
taking place in defense of the nation when it was the time. An example from French
boy scouts were given in one of the issues of Çocuk in 1940 which was about the
duties of French boy scouts during the War: “When the war had started this year in
France, the crops had not been harvested yet. Immediately, the boy scouts were
called to work. The boy scouts were divided into groups throughout the whole
country and harvested the products in the farms. They did the work left behind by the
adults fighting at the front as well as them.”140 In the same issue was written that “ If
138 “Geride kalan çocuklara da isler vardır. Bu çocuklar, harp olan memleketlerde, bazen çift isinde,
bazen dogrudan dogruya ordunun yanında ve her vakit büyüklerden bs kalan yerleri doldurmakla
vatana olan borçlarını ödemeye kosmaktadırlar. Türk çocugu, geregince cephede ve cephe arkasında
ne yapacagını herkesten iyi bilir“, “Harpte Çocuklar”, Çocuk, no. 159 (6 October 1939) : 16.
139 “Tayyare Hücumlarına Karsı Nasıl Korunmalıyız”, “Zehirli Gaz Nedir, Kaç Türlüdür? ”, Çocuk,
no. 191 (27 May 1940): 6.
140 “Bu yıl Fransada harp basladıgı zaman daha mahsul ortadan kalkmamıstı. Hemen izciler isbasına
çagrıldı. Yurdun her tarafına dagılan izciler tarlalarda kalan ekinleri topladılar. Cepheye harbe
giden büyüklerin gerideki islerini onlar kadar iyi basardılar”, “zci Zamanı Gelince Yurd
Korumasında s Alır”, Çocuk, no. 198 (31 August 1940): 13.
85
we are boy scouts today, tomorrow we will be soldiers, too. Long live the Turkish
Army…Tomorrow we will join it, too. Long live the Turkish boy scouts.”141
In these writings, the messages were told to children as if they were coming
from the mouths of all Turkish children. The messages in the writings were told by
the subject “us” which was a significant tool to attract children more to the message.
And in these messages,, the boy scout was defined as “the row made up of the groups
of hardworking and patriotist features of the Turkish Child” and it was a wish of “all
of us” to be a boy or girl scout. “The brown uniforms of the boy scouts have many
features resembling the uniforms of soldiers. The Turkish child loves the military
profession so much. Maybe it is because of this love that ww want to wear those
uniforms of boy scouting that make us feel like in the army until the honourable age
for joining the army comes.”142
Boy scouting in this respect was perceived as a very serious issue having its
own principles. Rakım Çalapala had underlined the features of boy scouts as such:
“The boy scout always keeps his promise, what he says is always true, the boy scout
keeps his honour and integrity above anything else, the boy scout obeys to his adults,
the boy scout is active and not afraid of taking responsibilities, the boy scout is brave
and runs to help the weak, the boy scout is the brother of everyone and the friend of
all other boy scouts, the boy scout is good-hearted, polite and joyful, the boy scout is
141 “Bugün izci isek, yarın biz de askeriz. Yasasın Türk ordusu. Yarın biz de ona katılacagız. Yasasın
Türk izcisi.“, ibid.
142 “zci, Türk çocugunun çalıskan, vatansever varlıgının düzgün sıralar halinde kümelenmesidir. zci
olmak, izci elbisesi giyinmek hepimizin pek istedigimiz bir seydir. zcilerin toprak rengi elbiselerinde
askere benzeyen çok seyler vardır. Türk çocugu askerligi ne kadar çok sever. O serefli askerlik yası
gelinceye kadar bize ordudan birseyler veren izci elbisesini belki biraz da onun için bu kadar severek
giyinmek isteriz.“, “Cumhuriyet Bayramı Çocugu zci”, Çocuk, Special Edition, (29 October 1939):
12.
86
thrifty, the boy scout loves and protects the animals and the boy scout makes a
favour each day.”143
To gain all these features, the children first had to learn to live together in
harmony and in solidarity. The camps opened every summer near seashores were
significant places for socialization of children. Camp life was something very
appreciated and emphasized a lot by children’s periodicals as the scheduled,
disciplined life and good nourishment “prepared robust children as little soldiers to
the country.”144
As it is seen, the children were expected to internalize the conception of the
reality of “war” and “honour” of taking place in the war and boyscouting during the
1930s provided the space through which the hegemony of the army was strengthened
in the minds of children.
***
This chapter focused on the political discourse level of six mainstream
children’s periodicals examined for this study and tried to show the meaning of
children for nation-state politics. The Republican elites equated the child
metaphorically with the nation and departing from this perception, attributed a
specific significance to instilling the ideals of the nation-state and the Republic onto
children. These children were expected to be aware of the greatness of their nation
143 “zci sözünden dönmez,onun dedigi dogrudur,izci namus ve serefini herseyin üstünde tutar, izci söz
dinler, izci giriskendir, mesuliyet yüklenmekten çekinmez, izci cesurdur, güçsüzlerin yardımına kosar,
izci herkesin dostu ve diger izcilerin kardesidir, izci iyi huylu, nazik ve sendir, izci tutumludur, izci
hayvanlaru sever ve korur, izci her gün bir iyilik yapar“, Rakım Çalapala, “zci”, Cumhuriyet
Çocugu, vol. 2, no. 43 (1939): 330-331.
144 Kemal Bilbasar, “Kamp ve Çocuk”, Cumhuriyet Çocugu, vol. 2, no. 31 (1939): 90-91.
87
and behave due to this. They had to get rid of their childish behaviours immediately ,
reach at maturity and internalize their duties for the sake of the Republic.
The adoption of the Latin Alphabet paved the way to the emergence of
children’s periodicals in Latin letters and most popular periodicals of the era were
owned by two teacher publishers, Faruk Gürtunca and Tahsin Demiray. They had
Turanist tendencies but their publication policies were in harmony with the state.
Their periodicals such as Çocuk Sesi published by Gürtunca; Yavrutürk and
Cumhuriyet Çocugu published by Demiray reflected the most popular nationalist
sentiments of the time. The images and themes published in their periodicals mostly
tried to internalize the secularist, progressivist, developmentalist ideals of the
Republic established on a faith in disjunction from the past. The tools internalized to
socialize children politically, were generally shaped around the power of single-party
regime and the state. After 1939, the periodical Çocuk of Children’s Protection
Society reflected the new meanings attributed to children in terms of war politics
more than other periodicals. The children were in these terms, the future soldiers of
the nation and as today’s boy scouts, they had to learn their responsibilities in the
country while their fathers and brothers were fighting.
Throughout this chapter, the socio-historical and political value of children in
Turkey in the particular context of nation-state formation was analyzed through the
mainstream children’s periodicals. The main aim was to present how children of the
Republic were perceived as valuable more in terms of the burdens the nation-state
politics attribute them than their essential value of being just “children.”
88
CHAPTER III
THE IDEALIZATION OF REPUBLICAN MIDDLE-CLASS CHILDREN:
READING ABOUT “POOR CHILDREN”
The codes of the ideal Republican family envisioned in the narratives of
children’s periodicals pave the way to perceiving the universe of children in the
1930s and 1940s Turkey as composed of the ones belonging to these ideal families
and the ones that are excluded from this idealized picture between the lines. The
ideal Republican family is a nuclear organ of the nation in which every member of
the family has specific roles within a division of labour. This chapter tries to shed
light on the ways through which the idealized picture of the Republican family with
its gendered nature in the periodicals combines with a specific middle-class life style
and paves the way to perceiving the children of mainstream middle-class Republican
families as the real subjects of the Republican project. This condition results in
otherizing the “poor, street, homeless” children just as the heroes or heroines in the
stories, poems or series of different writings in the periodicals that the middle-class
children read about as will be told in the fourth chapter. Poverty becomes an issue
89
with which the reader middle-class children are expected to establish a dialogue only
in terms of the emotions of mercy and the virtues of charity. The conception of
poverty in this sense, is emptied from its socio-economical and political value and is
just donated with moral meanings. “Poor children” and poor people are objectified in
most of the pieces as the objects who either were morally corrupt and vagrant and
that is why they remained poor or vice versa were very good-hearted, honest and
hardworking and that is why they became rich at the end and got rid of poverty. In
both cases, the middle-class child reader is expected to read about them and learn a
moral lesson.
The Idealized Roles of Fathers, Mothers and Children
Mom, dad, my little sister/And me, the little Kaya/Four of us
together/Make a family/Dad earns money outside/Mom does
housework/ My little sister and me/Just do studying work/The four of
us gather together/ Every evening in our house, in our shelter/ A deep
joy shines/ Just at that moment in our hearts.../We are four people in
our house/Locked together, linked together as a family/Each of us has
in this house / A responsibility to live in harmony.145
The most visible feature of a mainstream Republican family as reflected in
the periodicals is its nuclear nature being the space where the nation-state is
reproduced. The father, the mother and generally the two children -one boy and one
girl- are shown to form the home as the space of an organic entity suitable to the
solidaristic understanding of the nation-state where the family is an organ of the
145 “Anam, babam, kardesim/Bir de ben küçük Kaya/Dördümüz bir aile/Getirmisiz meydana/Babam
dısarıdan tasır/ Anam yapar ev isi/Kardesimle bana da/ Kalır okumak isi/Dördümüz toplanırız/ Her
aksam evimizde/ Sonsuz bir nese parlar/ Hemen o anda bizde.../Biz evde dört kisiyiz/ Kilit olmus dört
kisi/Hepimizin bu evde/ Var yapacak bir isi”, Rakım Çalapala, "Dört Kisiyiz," Çocuk Haftası, no. 45
(6 November 1943): 3.
90
nation.146 In this context, the family in the periodicals becomes the metaphor of a
functional organ where the division of labour in the family and the morals of this
division pave the way for the reproduction of order, normality and functionality as
perceived for the welfare of the Turkish nation-state. The efficient processing of the
roles of every member in the family are attributed the value of dignifying the Turkish
nation-state while the improper processing of these roles is shown to degenerate the
dignity of the nation-state.
My father is a civil servant. His entire job is made up of sitting at a table and
writing pieces of writing on the papers brought by the office man...See him when he
comes home in the evening: he complains a lot of tiredness...My mother is tired too
as she tidies the house and sews all day. My older sister went to curl her hair, that’s
why she is tired, too. And my older brother; he is completely tired as he studied his
lessons in law.147
The family as described from the mouth of a child in a monologue in Çocuk
Sesi in 1934 is very similar to the family mentioned in a poem nine years later in
Çocuk Haftası in 1943 in the first quotation of this chapter. Both pieces of writing
put the emphasis on the nuclear family where every member has responsibilities to
carry the Turkish society to the destination where all members of the family know
their places, their roles and try to fit the status-quo of the normal daily life of Turkish
society.
146 See for a detailed analysis of corporatism and solidarism in Turkey; Taha Parla, Ziya Gökalp,
Kemalizm Ve Türkiye'de Korporatizm (stanbul: letisim Yayınları, 2001).
147 “Babam memurdur. si sabahtan aksama kadar bir masanın basında oturup, odacının getirdigi bes
on kagıda yirmi otuz satır yazı yazmaktan ibarettir…Bir de eve döndügü zaman görün, kapıdan girer
girmez, of yoruldum, diye baslar…Annem de yorgunluktan dem vuruyor, odasını toplamıstır, dikis
dikmistir, büyük ablam bir yere kadar gitmis saçlarını kıvırtmıstır. Onu da bir yere kadar gidip
gelmek yormustur. Hele agabeyim, o büsbütün yorgundur, çünkü bilmem hukuk mektebinde okudugu
kanun dersine çalısmıstır“, smet Hulusi, "Tembellik," Çocuk Sesi, no. 238 (16 July 1934): 14.
91
The father, as the figure of discipline and order, works outside, looks after the
family and when he comes home in the evening, begins the process of educating the
child object. He becomes the figure who voices the moral norms of nationalism,
especially by the stories in the periodicals, particularly stressing the responsibilities
of every Turkish child in knowing and preserving the dignity of his nation by being
hardworking and reasonable.148
The mother, who is both a modern and lovely figure, shapes the inner house,
takes care of the children and reproduces the moral norms of the Republican family
as the moral education and discipline of children are her responsibilites throughout
the day until the main disciplinary figure -the father- comes home in the evening.
The children are responsible for studying their lessons, obeying their parents
and behaving in the way their parents expect.149 The children in this context are
generally expected to reach maturity at a very young age and to get rid of coyness
and childish behaviours, as we have seen in the second chapter in the poems about
Erdem. They are generally represented as little men and little girls who are aware of
their huge responsibilities for the welfare of the Turkish nation-state as honest,
hardworking, morally upright future citizens.
148 See Mahmut Attila Aykut, "Harp Madalyası," Çocuk Haftası, no. 92 (30 September 1944): 5; and
Semiramis Kök, "Kremalı Dondurma," Çocuk Haftası, no. 130 (23 June 1945): 14.
149 When we look at the features of a mainstream family in the context of nation-state formation
between the 1930s and 1940s as reflected in the childrens’ periodicals, we see some universal features
that are not bounded to the context of the 1930s and 1940s. For example, the fathers continue to be
figures of discipline both at home and in the public sphere in many contexts at present as the
children’s sole and biggest responsibility is obediance to their parents. But what makes the case
different for the 1930s and 1940s is related to the special place attributed to the family by the nationstate
discourse and practice. The nation-state discourse constitutes the family as an organic entity
which means the interference of the state to the family in the context of nation-formation is identified
through the norms of the welfare of the Turkish nation-state. But today when the norms of global
capitalism come before everything else and the space of the social is constructed on the norms of a
consumption culture, the family is perceived as an agent reproducing global capitalism by its
consumption patterns where the significance of nationalism is left behind.
92
The relationship of the mother and the child as reflected in most of the
periodicals can be best represented by one of the stories in Cumhuriyet Çocugu. A
boy named Aykut, who lived in hard conditions with his mother as his father had
died as a military officer in the National Struggle, always came home late and
wandered around the whole day as the leader of a group of naughty, vagrant children.
His mother was very sad about this because when she had warned Aykut, the boy
had responded in an very impolite manner and had broken the heart of his mother.
From then on, his mother had said nothing to him.
Aykut continued to steal money from home and spend it with his vagrant
friends. His mother knew this, but she also knew that Aykut would not be able to
find the right way by being rebuked. “And what she wanted was that her child, her
only child, whom she loved more than herself, would understand the harm of his bad
behaviour himself so that he would never do them again.”150
One night, Aykut came home, sat down at the table and waited for some food.
His mother brought the food, but she did not sit down. When he asked her why she
did not sit and eat, she said that there was a thief coming into their house everyday
and stealing all their money. The food in the house was just enoough for one person
and as there was not any money to buy some food, she could not eat.
It was at this phase when Aykut was educated morally as he understood his
tragic flaw and started to cry and beg to his mother to forgive him: “Mommy,
mommy, forgive me for all of all those days I gave harm to you. I swear on the soil
of my father is buried that I will never do bad things again. I beg you, forgive me,
embrace me. Take me away from this town. Let’s go away, let’s go far away. I want
150 “Ve istiyordu ki; çocugu, canından çok sevdigi biricik yavrusu, yaptıgı seylerin kötülügünü kendisi
anlasın da bu kötü seyleri, isleri bir daha yapmasın”, A. Öykümen, "Küçük Hırsız," Cumhuriyet
Çocugu, no. 12 (1938): 192-193.
93
to become a good person, like everyone else”151 The mother embraced her child and
the story arrived at a good and emotional conclusion.
What is important in this story is the style of the mother while educating her
child and the expectation from the child. The mother did not warn her child outright,
but she made him understand his mistake himself. To borrow the Javanese
conception, this style of the mother is very similar to the style of the mothers
reflected in the children’s stories in Soeharto’s Indonesia: guiding from behind (tut
wuri handayani). It was a state ideology in Soeharto’s Indonesia.152 This is best told
by an Indonesian children’s story in the best-selling children’s weekly magazine
Bobo in 1991. In a story titled “Silence Does Not Mean Approval”, a boy named
Yoga goes swimming with his friends after he asks for permission from his mother.
His mother keeps silent. Yoga comes home with an headache in the evening and
complains a lot. Then his mother says that it was because he had got too tired while
swimming all day and spending too much energy. The story as qouted by Shiraishi
goes on with the question Yoga asks:
“But why did Mama keep silent? Doesn’t it mean that Mama gave Yo
permission to go swimming?” Mama smiled. “Silence does not mean approval, Yo!
Aren’t you already grown up now? Mama does not like to treat Yo as a little child
who needs to be told everything every time...Yo must know by now what is best to
do”, said Mama while placing the cold compress on Yoga’s forehead.”153
151 “Annecigim, annecigim; sana çektirdigim o kötü günlerden, islerden beni bagısla. Sana babamın
topragı üzerine andiçerim ki bundan sonra ben artık kötü seyler yapmıyacagım. Yalvarırım sana beni
bagısla, beni kucakla. Bu kasabadan beni kaçır. Buradan gidelim, uzaklara gidelim. Ben de her iyi
insan gibi iyi olayım”, Ibid.
152 Saya S. Shiraishi, "Children's Stories and the State in New Order Indonesia," in Children and the
Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995): 169-83.
153 As Shiraishi says, “the theory that the child should be free and learn from his mistakes is thus
beautifully turned, in this children’s story, into a theory that the child should watch carefully and try to
find out what is in Mama’s mind, so as to avoid making a mistake and receiving parental/supernatural
94
Although this story belongs to a different context, the educational principle in
the story called “guiding from behind” is very fruitful for the context of the Turkish
nation-state in the 1930s and 1940s. In the children’s stories in the periodicals of the
1930s and 1940s, the child is always watched by parental discipline, but the mother
is more a figure of compassion while the father is more a figure of an apparent
discipline. The mother and the father both are responsible for the moral education of
the child, who in fact belongs to the nation more than to them but their relationship
with the child is different. The mother educates the child generally by guiding from
behind, and continuing to support him while he is making mistakes, while the father
generally gives straightforward advice and waits for direct obediance from the
child.154 In short, the style by which “domesticity” is constructed in the periodicals
punishment. This is the basic principle that any writer has to learn in order to survive in Soeharto’s
Indonesia. Writers can make considerable profits by voluntarily making their writings effective
educational and political tools for the regime. Editors buy the stories and parents buy the magazines
because the message in the stories is considered useful. The stories offer vital knowledge people need
to know in order to be citizens of the Republic(that is, to know what is in Soeharto’s mind.) The story
becomes politically effective, as well as commercially profitable.” Ibid:171.
154 In her book The Homework (Ev Ödevi) about the perception of childhood in some important
literary pieces in different eras in Turkey, Nurdan Gürbilek makes a valuable contribution while
identifying the codes of middle-class fathers as figures of authority and discipline with reference to
Tezer Özlü’s novel, The Cold Nights of Childhood (Çocuklugun Soguk Geceleri): “The mother and
father are penetrated to the book as just the representatives of a public world, an ideological tool
rather than as psychological contents or as faces to whom love or anger is directed. From what is told,
we learn that the father is a school inspector, tries to establish a military order at home and stands still
when the National March is played.A father made up of advices, warnings, daily schedules, notes on
small papers with his name,surname and signature at the end: “The light must come from the
left”,”The Book must be 30-45 centimeters away from the eye”, “The lights must be turned off as
soon as the studying is over” (Anne ve baba, bu kitaba sevginin ya da öfkenin yöneldigi birer yüzden,
ruhsal birer içerikten çok, sanki sırf kamusal bir dünyanın, ideolojik bir aygıtın temsilcileri olarak
girmistir. Anlatılanlardan, babanın okul müfettisi oldugunu, evde askeri bir düzen kurmaya
çalıstıgını, stiklal Marsı çaldıgında evde hazırol durdugunu ögreniriz. Ögütlerden, günlük
programlardan, küçük kagıtlara tutulmus çetelelerden, adı, soyad, bir de imzadan olusan bir baba:
“Isık soldan gelmeli”, “Kitap gözünüzden 30-45 cm. uzaklıkta durmalı”, “Çalısma biter bitmez
ısıklar kapatılmalı”…), Nurdan Gürbilek, "Memur Çocukları, Ev Ödevleri, Pazar Ögledensonraları,"
in Ev Ödevi (stanbul: Metis, 1998): 67-68. Who Gürbilek identifies as the middle-class father
working auspices the state as a civil servant, is the figure who wants not just to be the representative
of the family order but the representative of a more eminent public order; this is why he always
prepares schedules for his children, always wants to give advice and gives his children small papers
with notes on it reminding about all these issues (Ibid: 66). This analysis is most valuable for this
study in terms of putting forward some of the cultural codes that differentiate the roles of mother,
father and children at home in its complexity. They have been useful in evaluating the middle-class
and mostly civil servant fathers of Republican Turkey between the 1930s and 1940s. Another
interesting book about the child perceptions of its family and outer world in the beginning of the 20th
95
highlights how the roles of the mother, the father and children within the boundaries
of the nuclear family are made apparent.
Sons, Daughters, Beautiful and Compassionate Mothers, Mustached and Modern
Fathers in the “Warm Family Home”
Before evaluating the meaning of the metaphors of the middle-class family
values represented in the front pages of the periodicals Yavrutürk, Cumhuriyet
Çocugu and Çocuk Haftası from the 1930s towards 1940s, the significance of
domesticity must be rendered clear. Because the clues of the materialized aura of the
middle-class Republican family in the house pave the way to analyzing the cultural
codes sorrounding the life-style in that house which symbolize a broader universe of
Republican ideology. The values of a modern life in harmony donated with a great
love to the nation and state were wanted to be instilled into children of the 1930s and
1940s.
The English word “home” is a curious conflation, embodying elements
of both place and affect. A historical narrative plotting the gradual
union of these elements and the growing importance of “the home” in
modern Western societies is now familiar to many readers. This
history typically describes the intensification of emotional ties within
the nuclear family group, and the nineteenth-century development of
what has been called a “cult of domesticity”, accomponying the
proverbial “separation of work and home” and the retreat of the middle
class from the industrial city to the suburbs.155
century is Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert(Bin Dokuz Yüzlerin Basında
Berlin’de Çocukluk, translated by Tevfik Turan, (stanbul: YKY, 2004) where Benjamin tells his
memories of even smallest details of his surrounding in a mentally and physically transforming
bourgeois society. Once more, it becomes possible to render the significance of child eyes about the
world which reflect the most dramatic thresholds and value transformations of societies by small
details.
155 Jordan Sand, "At Home in the Meiji Period, Inventing Japanese Domesticity," in Mirror of
Modernity, Invented Raditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1998): 191. With reference to Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and arriage in
England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977). Sand reminds us that the “closed
domesticated nuclear family” originated in the late seventeenth century.
96
Jordan Sand focuses on the significance of domesticity as a tool of analysis
referring to the Japanese experience with domesticity in the context of modernization
in the Meiji Period.
The discourse of domesticity did not take place only on the plane of
language. Normalizing the home in Japan required redrawing the
contours of domestic space and reappointing its interior. Two
fundamental spatial problems had to be solved in the invention of
Japanese domesticity. First, to bind family and place, and give the
bond normative significance, families had to be persuaded not merely
to cohabit, but to exhibit family solidarity in some concrete form.
Devising and encouraging such manifestations became the concern of
progressive journalists and educators in the 1890s. Second, to
articulate the priority of family over other social groups, a house
design was needed that would segregate the cohabitant family from
non-kin and the outside world. Here architects had a role to play... In
its Meiji construction, the Japanese domestic ideal was vehemently
“middle class”, representing the segment of society in which the
journalists, educators, and architects doing the writing, speaking and
designing located themselves and their audience. New gender roles
and new moral meanings imbued in material life and daily practice
were invented to provide substance to the middle-class image. Thus, in
defining home, the framers of Japanese domesticity were also defining
themselves.156
Departing from this analysis, it becomes easier to visualize the relationship
between the domestic ideal of a particular era and the idealized class values
embedded in this domestic ideal. Just like the Meiji Construction’s domestic ideal
targeted the construction of new gender roles and new moral meanings emerging in a
particular middle class, the Turkish Republican experience with domesticity placed
its ideal on a flexible middle class defined mostly by the hierarchy of proximity to
the state. For the context of the 1930s and 1940s Turkey, the middle class values of
efforts at modernization and the perception of domesticity belonging mostly to the
state intelligentsia composed of mostly bureaucrats, teachers, soldiers and other civil
servants, could be observed in their daily lives at home. As Nursen Gürboga
156 Ibid: 193.
97
comments, “the experience with Westernization paved the way for the reorganization
of space in the culture of private life. Home has been lodaded with new meanings
parallel to the transformations in the family. The modern house was presented in this
sense as the “home” of the nuclear family and as the private space of the urban
middle-class household dressed up with the elements of the new material culture as
the symbol of the transformation in the 1930s.”157
The “good manners” and etiqette that should be followed and taught to
children were one of the most important elements of this material culture of the
urban, nuclear Republican family. These values were not just cultural codes
belonging to a standard idealized family in those years. They also highlighted the
hegemonic class practices in this particular context where the metaphors of poverty
told through the image of the child were constructing a duality distinguishing the
subjects unintegrated to this idealized middle-class family as will be discussed later.
A kind of modern urban middle-class family morality was on the surface158
and despite the discourse of “disjunction with the past” of this class, this family
morality had roots in the efforts of modernization since the nineteenth century. The
157 Nursen Gürboga, "Evin Halleri; Erken Cumhuriyet Döneminde Evin Sembolik Çerçevesi,"
stanbul Dergisi, no. 44 (2003): 58-59. This family was living generally in “healthy, useful,
comfortable houses”which was becoming a shelter to the father of the family coming home after
work in the evenings with its cleanliness, beauty and comfort that was provided by the talents of the
modern and bright housewife, Sibel Bozdogan, "Sıhhatli, Kullanıslı, Konforlu Evler: 1930'ların
Mimarlıgında Modernlik Söylemi," in Osmanlı'dan Cumhuriyet'e Problemler, Arastırmalar,
Tartısmalar, Sempozyum 1. Uluslararası Tarih Kongresi (stanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998):
346.
158 As Zafer Toprak tells, the roots of the modern nuclear family morality as envisioned by the
thoughts of Ziya Gökalp, was identified and materialized with the Unionist movement. “The ‘National
Family’ idea put forward by the Unionists was conceived of as a panacea for the salvation of Ottoman
society. Unionist intellectuals in search of national identity relied upon the family as the germ-cell of
the nation-state and family morality as the source of national solidarity”. This family was not an
imitation of European style, it would be modernized without sacrificing its Turkish traditional roots,
Zafer Toprak, "The Family, Feminism, and the State During the Young Turk Period, 1908-1918,"
Varia Turcica, no. XIII (1991): 451.
98
teachers, the bureaucrats, the soldiers were not creating a daily modern life that was
completely new, but they were in a way following the heritage of modernization.159
Yavrutürk, no. 127 (1 October 1938)
159 As Cem Behar and Alen Duben say, “The model of the European family which Ottomans began to
possess in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was part and parcel of a larger material and symbolic
world which they had been acquiring with a passion since the early 1800s. It is not possible to
separate the images and aspirations they held for their families, their spouses or potential spouses and
their children from the totality of the domestic and social environment in which such cultural elements
were set. The accoutrements of a European family life-style began to penetrate the homes of
significant numbers of Ottomans, particularly during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.
Many familiar objects of everyday use disappeared and were quickly replaced with alien alternatives.
Many ordinary rituals and routines of everyday family life began to change quite significantly.
Domestic life in stanbul came to contain a significant collection of symbolic markers of European
origin which would begin to set it clearly apart from its traditional Islamic past. Even the increasingly
Europeanized physical appearance of the individual family members served to remind them that they
were different from their ascendants. The end result was a significant change of direction in the
symbolic environment of the homes of many people in stanbul.” Alan Duben and Cem Behar,
Istanbul Households : Marriage, Family, and Fertility, 1880-1940, Cambridge Studies in Population,
Economy, and Society in Past Time. 15 (Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991): 202.
99
The tools to analyze the metaphor of this Republican family and inner house
are mostly the cover pages of periodicals containing cartoons and jokes. The pictures
of the father, the mother and the children show how a standard family is encoded in
the periodicals.
The most visible feature is the continuation of the nuclear family composed
of the father, the mother, the children and, in some cases, the grandmother or the
grandfather. The children in the pictures are usually shown studying their lessons,
doing their homework or playing home games in their spare time. Usually, the one
who is more focused on his lessons is the son of the family. He is pictured as an
hardworking, innocent, clean faced and well-dressed boy. He seems to know his
responsibilities and this is why his family seems to be proud of him.
As seen from the picture, the family members are trying to be quiet to allow
him study well in peace. The admiration and honor observed in the family members
is not isolated from the symbolic universe of the Republican admiration of education
and enlightenment; the more the son advances his mind, the more modern and
enlightened he will be. This is for his own welfare as well as for that of the nation.
Education is the main pillar lying in the symbolic universe of the picture as the
Republican progress rises on the shoulders of educated and enlightened future
citizens.
Looking at the picture, we see that the father is generally a mustached man
with glasses and wearing a suit. This is in fact the most frequently encountered
presentation of Republican fathers in the periodicals. Their hair is always combed
and their clothes are always tidy and clean. Interestingly, these clothes of the fathers
can well be clues to how the public space of the Republic was integrated with the
private space of the family. The father is usually dressed like that because of his job
100
as a state official in the context of those years. However does not remove those
clothes when he returns home in the pictures. It seems like the father is always
dressed like that at home, too. His suit is not just a simple piece of clothing, it carries
the power codes of both the state and middle-class fatherhood together. The father,
who is working outside usually as a teacher or a bureaucrat in the state, forms the
backbone of the Republic and the middle-class hegemony. His home is not an
isolated place from the state; his home is the space where the order of the family
should be protected just as the order of the state has to be protected. Everybody must
know how to behave for the welfare of the family and the state and the father feels
great responsibility as the promoter and controller of this order and discipline. The
public discipline outside the house and discipline in the house are not separate from
each other. While the father does not continue to be dressed like that with full
consciousness, he is aware of the power, order and prestige that the suit provides
him.
Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 14 (1938 )
101
Çocuk Haftası, no. 11 (13 March 1943)
102
Yavrutürk, no. 246 (11 January 1941)
103
The pictures above also highlight how motherhood and gender are
constructed in the children’s periodicals.160 Looking at the pictures, we see that the
mother watching her son with a smile on her face and the mother bringing coffee to
her husband are modern-looking ladies dressed in modern clothes. The mother
bringing coffee to her husband is dressed in a pullover and a skirt and in high-heeled
shoes, seems to continue the traditional hieraerchy between the man and the woman
in the family by being a figure serving her husband, but she is also a figure who cares
about clothing and her physical appearence as a modern Republican lady. Some other
mothers are pictured as more elaborate and modern looking as Republican ladies:
Çocuk Haftası, no. 89 ( 9 September 1944)
160 The author of this study is aware that the social context is composed of the interaction of socioeconomic,
cultural and political processes which are never separate compartments but shape and are
shaped by each other. The issue of gender and motherood in the context of the 1930s and 1940s
Turkey can not be well understood just with the symbolic universe related to them in the children’s
periodicals. They are huge issues which have to be analyzed in the context of the studies about the
state, welfare policies and the family. But either the social world can not be understood well without
the symbolic universe lying between the lines. This study is just an effort to get pace in social studies
and it is limited with the cultural arena focusing on how the social world is constructed literally and
culturally related to children in the children’s periodicals.
104
Yavrutürk, no. 282 (20 September 1941)
105
It is clear that the physical apperance of the mothers in the pictures reflects
their assumed socio-economic position taken for granted in the periodicals. But
although the standard perception of the family in the periodicals is the middle-class
which for example has to be careful about its budget161 and cares about teaching
thriftiness to the sons and daughters as the duties of the little organ of the corporatist
Turkish economy, the pictures reflect more an upper-middle class character. As
seen, the mothers are very assertive ladies who seem to spend a great deal of money
on clothes. The mother at the dinner table and the mother taking her son from the
school seem to keep up with the latest fashions. All the mothers in the above pictures
are wearing high-heeled shoes and their hair styles are quite elaborate. One of them
is wearing make-up at the dinner table. Another interesting thing is that they wear
their shoes in the house and so do their husbands as a sign of a modern life-style
contrary to Turkish tradition. They seem to sit at the dinner-table with aristocratic
sensitivities about the good manners that should be taught to children. For example,
in the cover page dated 7 July 1945 in Çocuk Haftası, the mother warns her daughter
about bringing the bread to the table with her hands: “Will I ever be able to teach you
anything Ayse? Does bread ever be brought by hands to the dinner-table? Does it not
need to be put in a plate?”162
161 “Geliri ayda 60 lira olan dört kisilik bir ailenin bütçe taslagı: Giderler: 10Lira Ev kirası, 25lira
yemek içmek, 3 lira su, elektrik, temizlik, çamasır, 2lira odun, kömür, 5 lira giyim kusam, 3 lira aile
eglenceleri, sinema ve gezmeler, 7 lira babanın, annenin, çocukların harçlıgı, 5 lira kara günler için
biriktirilecek para...Böyle bir bütçe hazırlayan aileler hiçbir zaman masraflarını bu bütçeden dısarı
çıkmadan yapar. Ve bütçeli hareket eden bir ailenin kenarda birikmis parası bulunacagı için hastalık
veya baska türlü herhangi bir fazla masraf karsısında bütçesi hiçbir zaman bozulmaz ve sarsılmaz”,
"Aile Bütçesi-Aile Bilgisi," Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 17 (1938): 299.
162 “Bayan-Sana bir sey ögretemiyecek miyim Ayse? Sofraya ekmek elle mi getirilir? Tabaga konmaz
mı?Ayse-Biliyorum ama, siz bilmiyorsunuz sandım.”, Çocuk Haftası, no. 132 (7 July 1945): 1.
106
Çocuk Haftası, no. 132 ( 7 July 1945)
107
These sensitivities about good manners at home reflect the class character of the
idealized Republican life style, but before examining this subject in more detail, the
dilemma about the construction of motherhood and gender should be highlighted
referring to the perception of girls in the periodicals. Because the roles that were
attributed to the mothers who were perceived as the “Sweethearts”163 of children in
the periodicals were the products of the same gendered perception of girlhood. The
dilemma is that, it doesn’t matter how modern and “equal with men” the ladies were
portrayed in the periodicals since the politics of modernization, their roles and
responsibilities in the house continued to prevail.164
163 "ki Sevgili: Anne Ve Mektep," Çocuk Sesi, no. 197 (1933): 1; Hamit Gündogdu, "Anne Sevgisi,"
Çocuk Haftası, no. 132 (7 July 1945): 6. For example, there is a story about a mother donating her
eyes to her blind son: Oguz Özdes, "Küçük Kör," Çocuk Haftası, no. 181 (22 June 1946): 14.
Interestingly, although the woman is perceived as a sacred human being as the “mother” of the future
generations, she also continues to be perceived as a dangerous, cunning creature full of ornamentation
which can be observed between the lines. For example, in a poem of Rakım Çalapala published in
Çocuk Haftası in 1943, the metaphor and the picture of the cat is used very skillfully to tell about a
woman in fact: “Bizim kedi bir kadından daha fazla süse düskün/Yalar durur ensesini, kulagını hep
bütün gün/Yumusacık bir kürk ile kaplı iken bütün eti/Bitmek bilmez yaramazın özentisi, tuvaleti...Bu
yumusak patiklerde saklanmasa birer pençe/Bu kediden daha cana yakın bir hayvan yoktur bence/O
pespembe dudakları paralayan disler saklar/O yumusak ellerde hançer gibi tırnaklar var”, Rakım
Çalapala, "Kedim," Çocuk Haftası, no. 18 (1 May 1943): 3
164 As Abu-Lughod comment about the Egyptian nationalist cause and its gendered practice,“These
forms of modernization-the induction of women into new domestic roles as ‘ministers of the interior’,
the professionalization of housewifery, the ‘scientizing’ of child rearing, women’s drafting into the
nationalist project of producing good sons, the organization into nuclear households governed by
ideals of bourgeois marriage, and even the involvement in new educational institutions-may have
initiated new coercive norms and subjected women to new forms of control and discipline, many selfimposed,
even as they undermined other forms of patriarchy”Lila Abu-Lughod, Remaking Women,
Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (UK: Princeton University Press, 1998): 8. In the same
manner, when the unity of work and home collapsed and men and women were separated from the
intimate daily routine of the household paving the way to a life style-the man at work and the wife at
home in England after the Industrial Revolution, the conditions for the development of children’s
literature in England were ready. Because “books that the mother could read to her children became
important adjuncts to her new role as child rearer”, Isaac Kramnick, “Children’s Literature and
Bourgeois Ideology” In Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, Political Ideology in Late
Eighteenth-Century England and America, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1990): 109-110.
For the Turkish case, see also Pınar Öztamur, "Defining a Population: Women and Children in Early
Republican Turkey, 1923-50" (MA Thesis, Bosphorus University, 2004). In her thesis about the social
welfare practices towards women and children through the governmentality paradigm in 1930s and
1940s, Öztamur examines how gender and motherhood are constructed in the population and health
policies of those years.
108
Tomorrow’s Housewives
The nationalist projects attribute great significance to the mothers who must
stay uncontaminated and have to be preserved for the welfare of the nationalist
course.165 The significance attributed to the mothers in Republican Turkey was
rooted in the policies of CUP whose pro-natalist policies aimed at the population
increase because of the great population decline in the country caused by the losses
in Balkan and First World Wars, migrations and population exchanges.
According to Toprak’s words; since many of the working, healthy, male
population had been lost, “women were invited to enter professions hitherto regarded
as the exclusive domain of men. They were employed as national governmental and
municipal clerks, as factory workers, as street cleaners, and even as barbers in many
districts of stanbul...By the end of World War 1, large numbers of women had been
integrated into the social and economic life of the country”166. But on the other hand,
the pro-natalist policies of CUP required women giving birth to many children,
increasing the population of the country and bringing up healthy future generations.
165 As Baron puts forward, from the 1870s on the Egyptian nation was depicted in human form in
sculpture, painting and cartoons which was mostly symbolized as ‘woman’ figures. This was
reasonable for the nationalists as they hoped to mobilize the masses for nationalism by drawing the
male youth into the cause based on a ‘love’ of the nation which had to be rescued from foreign insult
and preserved in her purity. The symbols of modernization and nationalism went hand in hand in the
process where the ‘unveiling’ represented the modern path to the newly ‘awakening’ nation. The
‘mothers of the nation’ were weak and uncontaminated and they had to be preserved who would bring
up the future citizens of the modern nation. In the context of competing and shifting understandings of
nationalism, the symbolization of the nation as a woman had many competing depictions. But despite
this, the ‘woman’ character of the nation maintained its primacy and continued to be the symbol
around which to create the hegemony of the nationalist discourse. Beth Baron, "Nationalist
Iconography: Egypt as a Woman," in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. Jankowski
and Gershoni (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): 105-124. See also Afsaneh Najmabadi,
"Sevgilive Ana Olarak Erotik Vatan: Sevmek, Sahiplenmek, Korumak," and Sylvia Walby, "Kadın Ve
Ulus" in Vatan, Millet, Kadınlar, ed. Ayse Gül Altınay (stanbul: letisim, 2000).
166 Zafer Toprak, “The Family, Feminism, and the State During the Young Turk Period, 1908-1918”:
448. The women were initiated to take more place outside also as the result of the family morality
internalized by CUP where “patriarchalism had to be replaced by partnership within the family
because the tenets of the 1908 revolution required “liberty, equality, fraternity”. The nuclear family
based on partnership was seen as the model family, one that would emerge from and also lead to the
emancipation of women.”, Ibid: 442.
109
This was a condition that resulted in a dilemma that, although women were needed
outside as the working population, their roles as good housewives and mothers in the
house continued much more as the result of pro-natalist policies.
The Turkish Republic took the heritage of the Young Turk Period. And in
terms of childrens’ periodicals, the domestic roles attributed to the mothers as the
ones who would bring up the healthy and morally upright future generations of the
nation lay at the background of the gendered interior house which started from the
perception of the roles of the daughters at home as tomorrow’s housewives.
Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 15 (1938)
110
Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 14 (1938)
111
In discourse of Turkish modernization, there was no difference between boys
and the girls: They were equal, they were both the most important people of the
nation-state and under secular education, they would grow up and be dutiful future
citizens. But between the lines, a different process was going on. The separation of
the private from the public space was paving the way to define the role of girls more
at home in the domestic arena than in the world. The daughter of the house had to get
used to the roles of modern motherhood from childhood. When we remember the
part about the metaphor of the child and the nation, we see that Erdem would go to
school, learn the duties that the family and the nation-state demanded from her and
contribute to her nation under the so perceived organic entity of the nation-state. But
she also had to learn her duties to be a morally upright and mature woman and
mother who would bring up children in the future. Just like this example shows us,
the roles of the girls and boys were being defined on gendered terms which were
setting the boundary of the space of activity for girls as future mothers.
Because of that, girls had to learn housework from their childhood and to
prepare themselves to be good and dutiful housewives. Serifsoy, who examines the
content of the textbooks on Family Knowledge (Aile Bilgisi), which was oriented
towards girls, and Citizenship Knowledge (Yurttaslık Bilgisi) between the years 1928
and 1950, gives interesting examples of this:
Our daughters should exalt their dignity from day to day so that in the
future when they become mothers, their children will resemble them. It
must also be known that, the children look like their mothers by their
morals as well as their physical appearance. The thing you learn today
is a prerequisite for the generations after you more than yourself. So,
when you carry out your womanhood and motherhood duties, we all
construct a strong basis, a basis of humanity linking everyone to each
other.167
167 “Kızlarımız kendilerini günden güne yükseltmeye çalısmalıdırlar ki ileride ana oldukları vakit
çocukları kendilerine benzesin. Sunu da bilmelidir ki, çocuklar sekilce oldugu gibi huyca da
annelerini andırırlar. Sizin bugün ögrendiginiz sey kendinizden çok, sizden sonraki çocuklar için
lüzumludur. O vakit kadınlık ve analık ödevlerinizi yaparken hepimiz ayrı ayrı ve birbirimize baglı
112
It is clear that the daughters were to be given a moral education that would
pave the way for dignifying and exalting the Turkish family and in order to continue
the order of the family, the mother was to sacrifice agreat deal. For the preservation
of the order of the family, she had to shut her eyes to the small mistakes of her
children and always be lovely to them, she had to be thrifty and had to use domestic
goods, she had to be warm, tough, wise, hospitable, modest, thoughtful, morally
upright and she had to never behave ill-temperedly to her husband.168
In this context, the role of the housewife mother was the backbone
underlying the preservation of the order of the house. For everything to function well
and normal, the mother had to do many things in the house and these were
immediately to be taught to the daughters with the help of pieces composed of advice
and small lessons about housewifery. In Çocuk Sesi, this was provided with advices
to girls under the title Hanım Kız. Some of the subtitles included under this title in
1934 were; Ordering the House, How Is a Paper Flower Made?, How To Arrange
the Furniture?, How To Clean the Mirror?and What Colour for the Walls?, Napkin
Ties (“The elegance of your napkins on the table is one of the things proving how a
lady you are”), How Is Ink Removed and How Is Desert Prepared and How Is A
saglam bir temel, insanlık temeli atmıs oluruz.” Quoted from Pakize çsel and Nazım çsel (1937-38),
Aile Bilgisi ve Ev daresi, lkokul IV, stanbul: Mürettibiye Basımevi, by Selda Serifsoy, "Aile Ve
Kemalist Modernizasyon Projesi, 1928-1950," in Vatan, Millet, Kadınlar, ed. Ayse Gül Altınay
(stanbul: letisim, 2000): 165. Although not much as girls, the boys were also attributed significance
in terms of “Family Knowledge”. For example in an article in Terbiye in 1929, it was written that the
boys had to be given the class about “Family Knowledge” with the girls as they would be the future
fathers of the families and an example from America about the boys taking the class of “Family
Knowledge” was given. A.B., “Oglan Çocuklara Evidaresi Dersi”, Terbiye, no: 13, (1929): 22-24.
168 Quoted from brahim Hilmi (1937), Aile Bilgisi-Ev daresi Üzerine Pratik Dersler. stanbul: Hilmi
Kitabevi by Serifsoy, Ibid.: 166. Serifsoy also reminds us how the family is compared and resembled
to a government where the father is the president, the mother is the minister and the children are the
subjects. For the narratives from the 1940s about the definition of the separate roles of women, see
Hamit Gündogdu, "Bütün Türk Kızları Gibi, Sarı Efenin Hikayelerinden," Çocuk Haftası, no. 37 (11
September 1943): 12-13; Mahmut Attila Aykut, "Avrat Yanında Er Aglamaz," Çocuk Haftası, no. 6 (6
February 1943): 4; Nihal Yalaza Taluy, "Anne Tembel Olursa," Çocuk Haftası, no. 98 (11 November
1944).
113
Bundle of Napkins Wrapped? (“You must have seen how your elder sisters and
mothers order the linen cupboard tidily by great care. What suits the housewife is
cleanliness and order. It is a very bad thing if the napkins are folded haphazardly
and their iron is messed up.”)169
The pieces about teaching housewifery to girls continue in the following
years under different subtitles under the title Family Knowledge (Aile Bilgisi).170
These were not just about the duties of housewifery that the girls should learn from
their childhood on; they were also pieces teaching the good posture and modelling
the ideal clothes for this ideal posture of a “well-mannered, innocent, warm” girl.171
But these definition of the roles of girls in children’s periodicals on gendered
terms did not pave the way for a political socialization of gendered hierarchies on
their own; they were meaningful as the parts of an ideological process that defined
and praised that hierarchy within the issues about nationalism. In other words, the
gendered terms in the periodicals as a broad picture of the context were much more
visible when taken together with the definition of the roles of the girls in the public
arena of the nationalist project where they were perceived just as supporters of
brothers and fathers, not as real agents fighting for the the nationalist course. To put
169 “Ev Düzeltmek, Kagıt Çiçek Nasıl Yapılır, Mobilyaları Nasıl Yerlestirmeli, Aynaları Nasıl
Temizlemeli, Duvarları Ne Renge Boyamalı, Peçete Bagları(“Peçetenizin sofrada sık durması hanım
oldugunuzu ispat eden seylerdendir”), Mürekkep Lekesi Nasıl Çıkar, tatlı Nasıl Yapılır, Mendil
Bohçası Nasıl Yapılır(“Annenizin, ablanızın bir çamasır dolabını ne kadar büyük bir dikkat ve
intizamla düzelttigini görmüssünüzdür. Ev hanımına temizlik ve tertipli olmak yakısır. Mendillerin
rasgele yere tıkılıp, ütülerinin bozulması fena bir seydir.”)”, Hocanım, "Hanım Kız," Çocuk Sesi
(1934). For the comparison of the perception of boys and girls, see "Anneniz Parmagına Niçin Evlilik
Yüzügünü Takar?," Çocuk Sesi, no. 256 (19 November 1934): 8; "Erkek Çocuklar Niçin Kız
Çocuklardan Daha Kuvvvetlidir?," Çocuk Sesi, no. 190 (21 August 1933): 14.
170 "Evin Tertibi-Aile Bilgisi," Çocuk Sesi, no. 360 (16 November 1936): 17; "Temiz Yogurt Yapalım,
Halıları Nasıl Temizlemeli-Aile Bilgisi," Çocuk Sesi, no. 361 (23 November 1936): 9; "pek Çorapları
Nasıl Yıkamalı, Ellerin Beyaz Ve Yumusak Olması çin," Çocuk Sesi, no. 363 (7 December 1936):
18.
171 "Kız Arkadaslara Yaz Tualetleri," Çocuk Sesi, no. 389 (7 June 1937): 14; "Kızlarımıza Bahar
Modelleri," Çocuk Sesi, no. 378 (22 March 1937); Hadi Fahri Ozansoy, "Kabahat"Te"De!-1 Perdelik
Komedi (Kız Çocuklar çin)," Çocuk Sesi, no. 311 (9 December 1935): 18-19.
114
it another way, they were perceived as fighters in the domestic arena of the house. It
could only be for the sake of the nation if they were needed outside.
In an operetta by Necdet Rüstü published in Çocuk Sesi in 1933, a girl says to
her mother that she wants to be a soldier: “Mama let me go/ I’ll join the army, yes
I’ll go/I’ll fight the enemies/ I’ll serve my nation.”172
Her mother listens to her with patience and love, but then she tries to make
her give upher dream by reminding her of real duties: “My dear, give up that kind of
a thing! Try to be a good housewife, not a good soldier. A woman who makes a
comfortable home from the house to her sisters, brothers, mother, children and
husband, already serves her nation just as a man soldier fighting in war.”173
But the girl does not listen to her mother and in the following issues, she goes
for an health check with some other girls to join the army. And at last they join the
army. An interesting dialogue occurs there with a young soldier. The soldier says to
the girl: “Your brother is here, your father is here. They are fighting for the
homeland. But your grandmother is at home, she is old. She needs your help. Now go
home. Cook her soup in this winter day: Don’t let her stay hungry!...Feed her stove,
don’t let her be cold...We the men are fighting here. But if we give our lives for the
nation and the fighting arena becomes empty, then you and all your friends can
come.”174
172 “Annecigim beni bırak, Ben askere gidecegim, Düsmanlarla vurusarak, Yurda hizmet edecegim”,
Necdet Rüstü, "Mektepli Kızlar Asker Olunca, Mekteplere Mahsus Operet, Necdet Rüstü Beyin
(Kadın Asker Olursa..!) Isimli Kitabından Mekteplere Mahsus Adapte Edilmistir.," Çocuk Sesi, no.
209 (25 December 1933): 12-13.
173 “Haydi Yavrum! Böyle seyden vazgeç! Sen iyi bir asker degil, iyi bir ev hanımı olmaya çalıs. Evini
kardeslerine, anasına, abasına, çocuguna rahat bir ocak yapmaya çalısan bir kadın, harbe gitmis bir
erkek kadar vatanına hizmet etmis demektir”, Ibid.
174 “Erkek asker: Senin kardesin burada, baban burada. Vatann için cengediyorlar. Fakat nenen evde
o ihtiyardır. Senin yardımına ihtiyacı var. Simdi eve git. Kıs gününde onun sıcak çorbasını pisir: Aç
kalmasın!..Ocagını yak, üsümesin..Biz erkekler burada cengediyoruz. Fakat yurt ugrunda canımızı
verir de savasl meydanı bos kalırsa, o zaman sen de, bütün arkadasların da, hepiniz, yurdun bütün
115
The interesting thing is that, at the end of the operetta we learn that all of it
was just a dream. The girl was dreaming all of it; in fact, presenting this narrative as
a dream helps the fictive character of women soldiers taking place in the mind of the
children. According to this narrative, it could only be a dream, not a reality
experienced. And with the help of this dream, the girl arrives at self-realization and
the song that the girls sing at the end serve the message of the mother and the soldier
more than their words: “Woman and man are not the same/ A great difference exists
between them/ Let them go to war/ We will stay here then/ We have a home here/
Who will take care of it then?/ If the Turkish Independence/ is endangered here/ It is
that time/ That the women be soldiers/ We have a name here/Who will take care of it
then?”175
As seen above, the girl comes to the right way at the end with self-realization
and this is the most encountered style of narrative in the periodicals. The hero or
heroine in the narrative under””stands her mistakes herself and “comes to herself” in
the end. She understands herself that her place was the home, her real duties are
within the boundaries of the sacred home at the end of most of the pieces.
For example, in one of the earlier pieces dated 1930, a little girl wants to
make great discoveries, join great adventures, create new things and know the world
well. She wants to be a pilot, a girlscout, a poet. She writes all her dreams in a
notebook and it is the narrative we read. One day she goes to discover a forest, but
she gets very disappointed that there is nothing new in the forest. She falls down,
hurts herself, gets lost and so has a very bad day. She gives up many of her dreams as
kadınları buraya gelirsiniz”, Necdet Rüstü, "Mektepli Kızlar Asker Olunca," Çocuk Sesi,no. 211 (8
January 1934): 14-15.
175 “ ..Erkek, kadın baskadır, büyük fark var arada, onlar harbe gitsinler, biz kalalım burada, bizim
bir evimiz var, sonra ona kim bakar, tehlikede kalırsa,Türk istiklali eger, iste kadınlar olur, ancak o
zaman asker, bizim bir adımız var, sonra ona kim bakar?” Ibid.
116
she gets disappointed and she also gets sad that her mother is ill and as her sister is
small, she has to take care of the house. In this period, she arrives at a self-realization
too and learns her place very well:
“My mother has got better now. Now I have given myself to reading
and writing. I am learning my lessons. I am sewing..I am dressing up
my dolls. I am taking care of the kitchen. Well, I am starting to be just
a little lady. I don’t have any complaints now. These things that I do
are more attractive. Today my mother saw what I have written and she
said: -Don’t be sad. Maybe you can not be a famous person as you
want. But if you do all these small daily duties everyday and be good
and hardworking at keeping the house, be sure that tomorrow
everybody will praise you. If you listen to me, believe me that this is
the secret of happiness my sacred child!”176
Interestingly, the adventure and journey narratives about far away lands
presented to the children in the periodicals seem to be written just for the imagination
of little boys. Because although the adventure and the ideals of making discoveries
were important metaphors for progress and enlightenment as we have seen in the
second chapter, in fact these ideals in real life could only be true for boys. The girls
should not dream of making discoveries in the world; their vision had to stay more
bounded. If they tried to do these “tragic flaws” and left home to discover the world,
they would not be successful, they would collapse metaphorically, just as the girl in
the above story fell down and hurt herself in the “unknown” world of the forest.
But there was one exception. In normal conditions, the girls in the narratives
mostly arrived at the self-realization that their homes were more important than
anything else. But, if the issue was about the appraisal of the Turkish nation, the
boundaries were cancelled in favour of this. In another children’s play in Çocuk Sesi
176 “Annem yavas yavas kendine geldi. Ben de simdi kendimi okumıya, yazmıya verdim. Derslerimi
ögreniyorum..Dikis dikiyorum..Bebeklerimi giydiriyorum...Mutfak islerine bakıyorum. Hasılı, tam bir
küçük hanım olmıya basladım. Artık sikayetim yok..Bunlar beni daha çok sarıyor. Bu gün annem
elimde defterimi gördü. Ben de ona yazdıklarımı okudum..Ne kadar sevindi. Gülümsiyerek alnımdan
öptü ve ksısım dinle dedi-üzülme, belki istedigin kadar meshur bir isim olamazsın! Fakat her gün
küçük gördügün bu isleri yapar ve dikkatli, hamarat bir kız olursan emin ol ki bugün ve yarın herkes
seni alkıslar. Ve hem de beni dinlersen, inan ki saadetin sırrı budur aziz yavrum!...”M. Murat,
"Büyük sler Yapacagım, Bir Küçük Kızın Defterinden," Çocuk Sesi, no. 32 (6 February 1930): 7.
117
in 1935, a rich girl named Yıldız, having received a foreign education from foreign
teachers abroad, returns to Turkey and at first starts to praise Europe to her friends.177
She is shown as a superficial girl lacking national consciousness. Her nationalist
friends in Turkey, who accuse the “snakelike” foreign teachers of washing the brain
of Yıldız, find her words praising the places in Europe meaningless. They compare
the places that Yıldız describe to them in Europe and say that in every case, they
would choose to go and discover the lands of Turkey, especially Ankara first. They
leave and when Yıldız stays alone behind, she arrives at a self-realization and travels
alone to Ankara to find her friends and learn the city’s history.
As we see, Yıldız is able to travel alone to Ankara, without needing to get the
permission of her parents because she is carrying out a very dignified duty by
wondering about her homeland and trying to learn its history. She is able to travel
alone and make discoveries about her homeland for the nationalist cause; otherwise
her parents would probably not let her go in real life.
Good Manners and Etiquette For Children
The above examples shows us that the moral education of girls in the
children’s periodicals was consistent with their future roles as mothers targeted by
the nationalist modernization project. According to the periodicals, they would be the
backbone of the preservation of the physical and moral order of the house, which was
so significant for the welfare of the nation as all the families served to keep society
tight as an organic entity. The interior house and the roles of the father, the mother
and the children in the house were not immune from the state. Just like the father
177 Muallim smail Hakkı, "Ankara Yolcuları-Ulusal, Küçük Operet: 3 Perde, Okul Temsillerinden,"
Çocuk Sesi, no. 271 (4 March 1935): 8-9.
118
pictured in a man’s suit in the domestic arena of the house shows us, the house was
not isolated from the state and free from control. The life-style of the Republican
father and mother in the house, their perceptions about each other and their
children’s roles in the narratives are very significant in terms of highlighting the
mainstream perception about the family and its living arena. Because this will
illuminate both the gendered hierarchies in the house as well as the hegemonic class
practices of the middle-class family.
We now turn to domesticity and the education of children about good
manners which will focus attention more to the class conflict taking place in the
Republican idealization of the middle-class family and child. While the middle-class
child and its manners is idealized, the vagrant child in the street is objectified.
The normal behaviour that is expected from children is generally presented in
the periodicals in the form of advice and educational materials and as hidden in the
messages of stories which show children who do not obey their parents as making
tragic mistakes.
When we look at the nature of pieces in the periodicals about good manners
and etiquette rules to be taught to children, we see that most of them are about
idealized behaviours that should be followed at home and outside. Below are some
examples from a list of good manners to be followed in 1938 in Cumhuriyet Çocugu:
1. When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you must do is to
go to the washbasin and clean yourself. Then go and and get dressed.
Go to the room where your family meets after getting dressed in order.
When going inside, greet everyone by saying “Good morning, Mother
dear, good morning, Father dear, good morning Sister/Brother dear.”
8. Both at breakfast and at other meals, sit down after the adults and sit
wherever they show you to sit.
11. Both in the morning before going to school and in the evening
when you return home, ask your mother if there is anything that she
would like you to do or to get from outside before focusing on your
119
studies or games. This desire of you to help your mother strengthens
your mother’s love for you.
18. Whenever you see or you are informed by your parents that it is
time to go to bed, go to your room saying “good evening” without
complaining, even if you are not sleepy. You must get used to living a
daily life that is planned from your childhood on.178
These rules target and idealize a child that is both a lovely and tidy, obedient
to his parents and other adults, who always want the best for him. As we see from the
rules above, the love of the mother is perceived as something conditional. Up to now,
we have seen the figue of the sacred mother living for her children and sacrificing a
lot from herself and trying to educate her children by guiding from behind. But in
these rules, the mother is described more as a tough and disciplined figure whose
love is conditional on the behaviours of her children.
This ideal child never deviates from the Republican ideals as long as he
continues to live a planned life in which he knows where to study, where to play,
where to talk and when to keep silent. There is another dilemma here. It is interesting
that although most of the comic pieces in the periodicals up to the 1940s praise wise
children who are active, social in behaviour and in speech as seen from the
caricatures in the front pages, the etiquette praise silence and passivity for children
between the lines. These children in the pictures make jokes to their parents and are
178“1- Her sabah yataktan kalkınca her seyden önce musluk basına kosarak temizce yıkanınız. Sonra
gidip giyininiz. Ailenizin sabah toplandıgı odaya temizlendikten ve giyindikten sonra gidiniz. çeri
girerken (Günaydın annecigim, günaydın babacıgım, günaydın kardesim) diye selam veriniz...
8- Gerek kahvaltıda, gerek baska yemek zamanlarında yemek masasına her zaman büyüklerinizden
sonra ve size gösterilen yere oturunuz.
11- Gerek sabahleyin okula gitmeden önce ve gerek aksam döndükten sonra kendi islerinize,
oyunlarınıza baslamadan önce annelerinize (bana yaptıracagınız bir isiniz, dısarıdan aldırılacak bir
seyiniz var mı annecigim?) diye mutlaka sorunuz. Bu yardım yapma istekleriniz annelerinizin size
karsı olan sevgisini kuvvetlendirir.
18- Yatma saatinizin geldigini gördügünüz veya size haber verildigi zaman büyükleerinize tünaydın
diyerek onları üzmeden uykunuz olmasa bile hemen yatak odalarınıza giderek yatınız. Programlı
yasamaya daha küçükten alısmalısınız.”, "Sosyal Hayat Bilgileri, Evde Ve Aile çinde," Cumhuriyet
Çocugu, no. 17 (1938): 293.
120
pictured as very sympathetic and wise children who are goot at giving quick replies
and making their parents laugh or surprised with their cunning. But in fact, when we
look at the definition of good manners, we see that these rules target a child whose
image is just a silhouette and who doesn’t talk much. The child envisioned in these
rules is more a silent, passive and obedient figure opposed to the more confident and
assertive children in the pictures.
Çocuk Haftası, no. 181 (15 June 1946)
121
Çocuk Haftası, no. 179 (1 June 1946)
122
The other important thing is that, the child as an object to be filled with good
behaviour, is objectified for the promotion of the modern image of the Republican
daily life the production of which is sought everyday by the daily aristocratic patterns
that had proceeded parallel to the route of Europenization since the nineteenth
century. The most important space for this had been eating habits.
64. When you get inside the dining room and sit down at the table, do
not look around and try to learn what will be eaten during the meal. Do
not ask anything. Otherwise they will call you greedy and a thief.
65. Do not rush when you sit down at the table. First wait for the
adults to open their napkins and get ready for dinner. Then you too can
open your napkin carefully and silently and get ready for dinner.
66. When you start, eat your food slowly with a smiling face. Never sit
with a sullen and low-spirited face at the dining table.179
Looking at the rules for meal times, we see that the focus of the concept and
atmosphere of the “dining-table” is very strong. The dining table is arranged as a
space with its own modern atmosphere for the nuclear Republican family. The father,
the mother and the children sit around it according to a planned daily life and its
rules and this image feeds the reproduction of the visualization of the modern family
between the 1930s and 1950s whose roots were embedded in the transformations that
were taking place especially in the twentieth century. According to what Behar and
Duben say, the middle classes were hit by the process of Europeanization in dining
habits such as eating on a dining table in a fixed meal time in the early 20th century.
179 “64- Yemek odasına girdiginiz ve masa basına oturdugunuz zaman etrafa acele göz gezdirerek ne
yemekler bulundugunu ögrenmeye kalkısmayınız. Hiçbir sey sormayınız. Sonra size aç gözlü ve hırsız
derler.
65- Masaya oturduktan sonra hiç acele etmeyiniz. Önce büyükleriniz peçetelerini açsınlar ve
hazırlansınlar. Sonra siz de sessizce ve dikkatli olarak peçetenizi açar ve yemek için hazırlanırsınız.
66- Yemege baslanıldıktan sonra neseli bir yüzle yemeginizi agır agır yeyiniz. Yemek masası basında
nesesiz ve asık bir suratla sakın durmayınız.”, "Yemek Masası Basında," Cumhuriyet Çocugu 1, no.
26 (1938): 471.
123
In the traditional Ottoman home of the nineteenth century, there was no set, regular
mealtimes and “ regardless of class, the family dined crouching around a large tray
(sini) set in the centre of what was, at least for those other than the elite, a multifunctional
room. In upper-echelon families men and women might dine separately.
There was no dining room, nor was there a dining table; hands or spoons rather than
knives and forks were the eating implements, and food was eaten directly from the
dishes in which it was served”180
When we remember the pictures in the front pages of the periodicals, we see
that the living space of the family is a living room where the mother, the father and
the children spend their time together. There is also a separate space or room for the
dining table which has its own rules, as seen above. The Ottoman urban houses with
multi-functional rooms based on gender segregation as the harem and selamlık
throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries181 were transformed and as
the harem left its place to the living room and the selamlık to the reeception room,
new rules and arrangements in the household space emerged although not in a linear
fashion. As Özbay explains,
“During the Republican period in particular, officers and civil servants
perceived the adoption of Western lifestyles as an indication of loyalty
to the new political system. However, stanbul households took up the
use of Western furnishings in a rather eclectic and piecemeal fashion.
Armchairs were the first to be adopted and were put, as might be
expected, into the most public room, the masculine selamlık. Soon
such features became widespread status symbols for upper-middle and
middle-class households. However, the adoption of dining tables took
longer, for the traditional order of the house did not change radically
with just the adoption of armchairs in the selamlık. Household
members did not have to sit in these armchairs, which were mainly
used for guests, and it was difficult to shift dining habits, learned in
180 Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households : Marriage, Family, and Fertility, 1880-1940: 206-210.
181 Ferhunde Özbay, "Gendered Space: A New Look at Turkish Modernisation," Gender&History 11,
no. 3 (1999): 558.
124
childhood, which involved eating while witting on the floor or off
portable mats.”182
The pictures in the front pages of the periodicals as seen above show that, the
image of the dining room, dining table and living room had already been popularized
and idealized as belonging to the standard middle-class Republican nuclear family
life-style. This life-style required new etiquette and these rules were in harmony with
upper-middle class aristocratic sensitivites, as seen from the rich dining table, the
separate plates, forks, knives and the smartly dressed father and mother of the family.
These idealized good manners and etiquette were not bounded with the
interior household space. The aristocratic sensitivities of the idealized Republican
family were also valid for the street. Interestingly, the etiquette rules thought for the
outer space paved the way for the conception of “street children” to be emphasized
more in the periodicals versus children living as the “dear sons and daughters of
Republican families”:
27. Do not stand for long in front of shop windows and cinemas,
particularly not in front of the shops selling food. Otherwise, they will
call you shameless.
29. Never jump or hang onto the trams by taking street children as a
model. Do not run after cars or trucks.
30. Do not make fun of poor and mentally disabled people in the street
when you meet by chance, do not try to make them angry. You must
help as much as you can people in this condition.183
182 Ibid: 560.
183 27. Dükkan, magaza, sinema vitrinleri önünde uzun zaman durmayınız. Hele yiyecek satan yerlerin
vitrinleri önünde hiçbir zaman durmayınız. Sonra size arsız derler.
29. Sokak çocuklarından örnek alarak hiçbir zaman tramvaylara atlamayınız, arkasına asılmayınız.
Otomobil, kamyon gibi tasıma araçlarının arkasına takılmayınız.
30. Sokaklarda, mahallelerde rastladıgınız bazı zavallı akıl hastası insanlarla hiçbir zaman
eglenmeyiniz, onları kızdırmayınız. Böyle zavallı kimselere elden geldigi kadar yardım etmelisiniz.,
"Sokakta," Cumhuriyet Çocugu 1, (1938): 373.
125
As seen, the warnings written for children in the periodical target a particular
child as its reader and objectifies another particular child as its object in the piece. It
becomes more visible that a particular group of children perceived as the readers of
the periodicals were the ones with whom the writers in the periodicals were trying to
establish a dialogue. That dialogue was oriented towards children who were
definitely not “street children.” Because, the so-called street children were only taken
as objects to warn the reader, middle-class children of Republican families were not
to behave like them. Between the lines there is the abstraction that a group of
children were the readers to whom all etiquette were being explained, and that there
was also a group of children that those reader children were to avoid.
Interestingly, the Republican social policies included the integration of
homeless children through charity and social control. But the metaphors in the
periodicals show us that although the conception and promotion of charity existed in
the periodicals due to the “child question” of the Republican period, this was not
immune to the reproduction of a duality between the integrated middle-class children
buying and reading the periodicals and others living on the street. The children living
on the street were sometimes shown as vagrant, naughty and morally degenerated
children, as seen in the above example, where the source of bad manners is “street
children”, sometimes shown as objects needing the mercy of the adults, or as little
heroes who managed their lives with good morals in their childhood and became
successful in the end, as will be seen in Kemalettin Tugcu’s stories in the following
chapter.
126
And the Summer Comes: Children of Beaches and Camping
This dilemma of the duality in the periodicals between the middle-class
Republican children living with their nuclear families in warm houses due to good
manners and etiquette and reading their periodicals comfortably and “street children”
living outside either as the objects of bad manners or vice versa as objects of success
stories shows us that although the Republican ideology claimed that all the children
were equally the future of the nation, those living in warm houses under the watch of
their enlightened parents were “more equal” as they were more inside the Republican
vision of the nation.
Yavrutürk, no. 271 (5 July 1941)
127
In the summer of 1937 Çocuk Sesi published a poll and asked its readers their
plans for the summer holiday. The answers and the socio-economic background of
the writers were very similar to each other:
1. A plentiful calorise, sleep, sports and making open air fun for my
health.
2. Strenghtening my general knowledge by reading worthwhile and
lucrative pieces like Çocuk Sesi
3. Always winning the struggle for life by being ready all the time
through compensating for my deficiencies.” By Cavit Topakoglu, the
brother of Isparta 10. Region Land Forces Infantry Regiment
Lieutenant Cemal, 184
Eventually I graduated by passing the examination that I was afraid of
so much. Now my only aim is to discover my country, Africa and
Australia. The only way to make these discoveries is to be a pilot. So,
with the help of my mom and dad, I will be a pilot and fly on the
horizons of my country for the nation’s sake and at times for my own
pleasure. By 351 Demir Isık, student of Etimes’ut Boarding School 185,
I will pass my time by reading the volumes of Afacan and Çocuk Sesi
that I have collected with great pleasure up to now under the calm
shadows of trees in this holiday which is a gift for me as a result of my
nine month tiredness from my studies. By Lami Ataman from stanbul
Galatasaray High School186,
I and my friends thought about going camping for this holiday. We are
going to do it on the green slopes looking over the sea at Pendik.
Reading the issues of Çocuk Sesi under the beautiful calm shadows of
pine trees makes us the happiest people in the world. Come on then to
the sea! And long live camp life! By Turanb Üstünel, son of N.
Okçu187,
1841. Sıhhatim için bol kalori, uyku, spor, açık hava eglenceleri yapmak
2 . Çocuk Sesi gibi faydalı ve kazançlı eserler okuyarak umumi bilgimi kuvvetlendirmek
3. Gelecek yıla hazır olmak için noksanlarımı takviye ile hayat mücadelesinde her zaman galip
çıkmaktır. Isparta Piyade alayı BL. 10. K. V. Tgm. Cemal kardesi Cavit Topakoglu "Tatilde Ne
Yapmak Fikrindesiniz? Anketine Gelen Cevaplar," Çocuk Sesi, no. 392 (28 June 1937).
185 “Çok korktugum sınav sonunda iyi derecede mezun oldum. Simdi yegane emelim yurdumu,
Afrikayı, Avustralya’yı gezmek ve tanımaktır. Bu gezileri yapmak için de tek çare tayyareci olmaktır.
ste babamın ve annemin yardımı ile tayyareci olup yurdumun nihayetsiz ufuklarında ulusun, icabında
zevkim için uçacagım.”, Etimesgut yatı okulu ögrencilerinden S. 5 no. 351 H. Demir Isık. Ibid.
186 “Çok yoruldugum dokuz aylık çalısmanın hediyesi olan bu üç aylık tatilimi, Pendikte serin gölgeli
agaçların altında simdiye kadar pek severek biriktirdigim Afacan ve Çocuk Sesi ciltlerimi karıstırarak
okuyacagım..”, stanbul: Galatasaray Lisesi Lami Ataman, Çocuk Sesi, no. 394 (12 July 1937).
187 Ibid.
128
I will pass my holiday time swimming amply at our house by the sea
in Bebek.188 By Günsel Nugay from stanbul,
1. Getting up early in the morning and doing physical exercise and
after breakfast, studying German and other lessons for two hours.
2. Reading Çocuk Sesi, Afacan and a novel for two hours and then
fishing and bathing in the river.
3. Sleeping after lunch and after that going to green areas with the
lamb that my father gave to me. Sitting there under calm shade and
reading my dear Çocuk Sesi while listening to the lambs. After that,
playing football.189 By Kemal Güvenli from stanbul,
I am going to the Suadiye Family Club that will be opened on the
sixteenth of August.190 By Aydın Bil.,
After finishing my camp that will continue for 20 days, I will go to a
village and have fun in the sea after 15 minutes exercise in the
morning.191 By Ekrem from stanbul Sisli Terakki High School.
Whether or not the answers above belong to the children themselves or to
their families writing to the periodical in their names or to the editor familiar to the
general aura of the reader profile; these answers give important clues about the socioeconomic
and cultural background of the readers of the periodicals. These children
generally belonged to middle-class families, with educated parents whose idea of
holiday was a summer camp where their sons and daughters could learn to plan their
lives and learn when to play and when to study. For a literate Republican family,
making children learn to live a planned daily life was an important feature as they
had to be educated about this from their childhood on. If the children cared about
188 “Tatili Bebek’te deniz kenarındaki evimizde bol, bol denize girmekle geçirecegim..”st. Günsel
Nugay, Çocuk Sesi, no. 399 (19 July 1937).
189 “1- sabahleyin erkenden kalkıp idman yapmak ve kahvaltıdan sonra 2 saat almanca ve diger
derslere çalısmak. 2-ki saat Çocuk Sesi, Afacan mecmuaları ve roman okumak, sonra ırmak
boylarında olta ile balık tutmak ve yıkanmak. 3-Ögle yemeginden sonra uyumak ve ondan sonra
babnın aldıgı kuzuyu arkama takıp kırlarda gütmek, püfür püfür esen rüzgarın karsısına oturup
kuzuların melemelerini dinleyerek biricik Çocuk Sesini okumak ve sonra top oynamak.” st. Kemal
Güvenli, Çocuk Sesi, no. 399 (16 August 1937).
190 “Agustosun 16 sında açılacak olan Suadiye aile kampına gidecegim..”
Kurtulus Cad. Hıdır apt. kat 4. Aydın Bil. ,Çocuk Sesi, no. 400 (23 August 1937).
191 “20 gün süren kampımı bitirdikten sonra bir köye çekilerek sabahları 15 dakikalık bir idmanda
sonra denizde eglenmek...”st. Sisli Terakki Lisesi Ekrem. , Ibid.
129
their studies, learning a foreign language, keeping their bodies healthy and reading in
the summer time too, their time would not be useless but would be fruitful and
functional for their future. Summer time continued to be a time for performance for
middle-class children, whose mostly literate families cared a lot about giving their
children a qualified and modern education embedded in well organized schedules
oriented toward both the mind and body.
But the appraisal of camp life was not only a sign of the Republican
sensitivity about proper education for the progress of the mind and the body. It was
in fact a sign of the Republican vision and perception of “holiday”, which paves the
way for an evaluation of the hegemonic daily class codes of the particularly and
mostly literate Republican middle-class between the 1930s and 1950s. In one of the
issues of Yavrutürk in 1938, a question was asked: “What is a camp? What is it good
for? Have you ever been to a camp?...Would want to go to the summer house with
your family or to a camp with your friends? Why?”192 This question is not a broad
one. It does not offer children many answers, but just two: Either going to the
summer house of the family or to a summer camp. To ask a question like this, we
must expect from the writer that he perceived he was asking this question to a group
of children who surely had summer houses. He definitely was not asking this
question to those “poor” or “homeless” children as in Kemalettin Tugcu’s stories to
which I will refer later. There were just two options. And these two options were
both in the space of a particular middle-class life-style where the prior needs were
afforded so that thinking about summer holiday was not a luxury and the family
already owned a private property such as a summer house. So, between the lines, the
writers were trying to establish a dialogue with those children who had the option of
192 “Kamp nedir? Ne faydası vardır? Siz hiç kampa gittiniz mi?...Ailenizle birlikte yazlıga mı gitmeyi
istersiniz, yoksa okul arkadaslarınızla birlikte kampa gitmegi mi? Niçin?”, "Hayat Ve Tabiat,"
Yavrutürk, no. 120 (13 August 1938): 234.
130
either going to a summer house or to a summer camp. In short, the subjects that they
targeted were children like those we have seen in the front pages of the periodicals:
children living with their modern parents in warm apartment flats. Poor children
were only to be watched to be felt compassion for in the children’s periodicals.
Also, as seen from the letters, some of the children lived in houses near the
sea in Bebek or Suadiye so that they could go to the sea to swim everyday. In other
letters that are not included here, a significant proportion of them attended schools
like Sisli Terakki, Galatasaray and stanbul High School, which targeted a small
population of economically and culturally elite families.
But what is more interesting is that, in other children’s letters written to the
periodicals especially for the reward campaigns that were significant for the the
popularity of the periodicals, as seen in Yavrutürk,193 the children or their families
signed the letters and identified themselves with the job of the father or the brother
who was working as a civil servant, as a teacher or as a soldier under the auspices of
the state. Once more it becomes more visible that there was a high proportion of
middle-class children of civil servants, soldiers, teachers, bankers and private
investors reading these periodicals more than any others in lower ranks of the society
between the 1930s and 1940s. These letters also what kind of child was inside the
Republican vision of the writers, in fact, the Republican intelligentsia in the
193 Yavrutürk, which was published between 1936 and 1942 and included 10 big child novels, 20 long
stories, 170 illustrated stories, 124 stories, 32 tales, 132 short stories, 12 stories written in verse, 62
poems, 153 caricatures, 198 life-nature and history-geography writings, 27 articles, 3 dramas and 21
tables inside its 1268 pages in its first two years, distributed many rewards from books to annuals and
maps to 8500 children as a result of puzzles. From Yavrutürk, it becomes easier to follow the
popularity campaigns and the profile of the readers which was also published in cities in Anatolia
such as Tokat, Kars and Diyarbakır, too. Yavrutürk sent the rewards to readers in Anatolia by post but
readers from stanbul went to the printing house and received their rewards themselves on Saturday
and Wednesday afternoons:,“Yavrütürk ciltleri birer hazinedir. Simdiye kadar 1268 sayfada 10 büyük
çocuk romanı, 20 uzun hikaye, 170 resimli, hikaye, 124 hikaye, 32 masal, 132 küçük hikaye, 12
manzum hikaye, 62 siir, 153 karikatür, 198 hayat-tabiat ve tarih-cografya yazısı, 27 makale, 3 piyes
ve 21 tablo vermistir”, “Yavrutürk ki Yılda 8500 Kisiye Kıymetli Bilmece Hediyeleri Dagıttı”,
Yavrutürk 5, no. 106 (7 May 1938): 18.
131
periodicals and whom the periodicals targeted as the real subject-readers. Some of
the reader-children whose names were published in the list of reward winners or
readers’ letters had signed their letters as such:
Nihal Arkayın, the daughter of Aydın Turkish Air Institution (Aydın
Türk Hava Kurumu Baskanı Kızı Nihal Arkayın),194
Hulki Arısoy, the son of Malatya Railway Station Chief (Malatya Gar
Sefi oglu Hulki Arısoy),195
Suna, the daughter of Beykoz Post-Telegraph-Telephone Civil Servant
H. Akgül (Beykoz, P.T.T Memuru H.Akgül Kızı Suna),196
Rıza Dilmener, by the hand of his brother, Turkish Agriculture Bank
Accountant (T.C. Ziraat Bankası Muhasibi Elile Kardesi Rıza
Dilmener)197
Ömer Sayılı, the son of Diyarbakır People’s House Director
(Diyarbakır Halk Evi Müdürü Süleyman Sayılıoglu Ömer Sayılı),198
Secaattin Tüzenen, the son of Haydar Tüzenen, Nazilli Head of the
State Tax and Finance Office (Nazilli Mal Müdürü Haydar Tüzenen
Oglu Secaattin Tüzenen),199
Hasan Akbud, the son of Trabzon Dentist Kemal (Trabzon Dis Tabibi
Kemal oglu Hasan Akbud)200 and
Nermin Isık, the daughter of the Secretary of Public Prosecutor Hilmi
Isık (Zonguldak E. Müddei Umumisi Katibi Hilmi Isık Kızı Nermin
Isık).201
194 Çocuk Sesi, no. 395 (19 July 1937).
195 "Hatıra Albümünde Resmi Çıkanlar," Çocuk Sesi, no. 391 (21 June 1937).
196 "111. Sayımızdan Hediye Kazananlar," Yavrutürk 5, no. 115 (9 July 1938): 163.
197 "113. Sayımızdan Hediye Kazananlar: Birer Yavrutürk Yıllıgı Kazananlar," Yavrutürk, no. 117 (23
July 1938): 191.
198 "Muhtelif Hediye Kazananlar," Yavrutürk, no. 119 (6 August 1938): p. 223. In this issue, we also
see a sign: “Çorlu, the apprentice Ibrahim Öztürk by the hand of shoemaker Münir.” It seems that a
child apprentice of a shoemaker was also following the issues of Yavrutürk, but this does not reflect
the general reader profile. As we see, the general profile is composed of mostly children of civil
servants from middle and upper ranks.
199 "116. Sayımızdan Hediye Kazananlar," Yavrutürk, no. 120 (13 August 1938): 234.
200 Ibid.
201 Ibid.
132
As seen from the names and jobs above, the reader children generally
belonged to a particular middle-class background where the fathers of the families
identified themselves by their place under the auspices of the Republican
administration. When combined with the interior-space of the houses shown in the
front pictures as modernized middle-class flats owned by those Republican nuclear
families where the mother, the father and the children have definite roles and the
etiquette rules and warnings about a fictive Republican morality is a mainstream
Republican ideology in homes with the perception of families and children about
their free time during holidays, these letters offer a broader socio-economic and
cultural picture of the ideal Republican nuclear family whose clean, tidy,
hardworking children living in a daily comfortable order are the real subjects
targeted by the writers in the periodicals. Poor and homeless children were just being
watched from the inside. The middle-class children were just “looking at” and
“reading” about them.
133
CHAPTER IV
THE ONES BEING WATCHED AND READ ABOUT:
VISIBILITY OF POVERTY IN CHILDREN’S PERIODICALS IN 1940S
“If a poor child comes and requests your book/Never, but never refuse
him, give him your book/He can read, he can study as everyone then/
It is shameful to be stingy, but everyone praises generosity../If a poor
child comes and requests your fruit/ Think then: Well-fed people must
help the hungry ones!../The poor, helpless child must have felt appetite
for it, do not drag him with you/ Do not eat all of it, give him a piece of
your fruit!../Never annoy the
poor people/ Give them what they request, make them smile!/But: If
somebody comes and wants your homeland,/ In no way give your
homeland, even give him a severe thrashing, moreover kill him!..”202
The Turkish child is warmhearted.
The Turkish child loves honesty.
The Turkish child wishes goodness.
The Turkish child feels himself indebted and responsible for helping
his poor friends.
O, the Turkish child reading these lines!Do not ever forget to show
your warm heart, your honesty and your wish of goodness to the poor
202 Bir fakir çocuk gelip kitabını isterse,/Sakın ha: “Olmaz..”deye, geriye çevirme, ver!/O da biraz
okusun, o da çalıssın derse,/Hasislik fena seydir! Cömerdi herkes sever!../Bir fakir çocuk gelip, isterse
yemisinden,/Düsün ki: Tok olanlar yardım etmeli aça!../Zavallı imrenmistir, sürükleme
pesinden,/Hepsini kendin yeme; ver ona da bir parça!../Sen fakir olanların sakın sıkma
canını,/stediklerini ver, mutlak yüzünü güldür!/Fakat: Biri gelip te isterse vatanını,/Ona kat’iyyen
verme, hatta tepele, öldür!.., Necdet Rüstü, "Ver!-Verme!..." Çocuk Sesi, no. 248 (24 September
1934): 5.
134
in Bayram...Do not forget that you feel responsible for helping the
poor.203
Çocuk Haftası, no. 173 (20 April 1946)
Until this point the discussion has focused on the target population of the
children’s periodicals, the children of middle-class Republican intelligentsia, mostly
composed of bureaucrats, civil servants, teachers, soldiers and private investors
working hand in hand with the state. These families could afford to buy their children
the periodicals every week, both because of their socio-economic status and the
203 “Türk Çocugu Yüksek Kalplidir/Türk Çocugu Mertligi Sever, Türk Çocugu yiligi Özler/Türk
Çocugu Yoksul Arkadaslarına Yardımı Kendine Borç Bilir/Ey Bu satırları Okuyan Türk Çocugu,
bayramda yoksullara yüksek kalbini göstermeyi, mert oldugunu, iyiligi özledigini, yoksul
arkadaslarına yardımı kendine borç bildigini unutma... "Seker Bayramınız Kutlu Olsun," Çocuk Sesi,
no. 313 (23 December 1935): 3.
135
importance they attributed to daily education in addition to the school for the
progress of the nation.
These children were always pictured as warm, humorous and shining
individuals who were wise and mature for their age. The front pages of Yavrutürk
and Çocuk Haftası usually featured pictures and caricatures where these children
living in middle-class flats with their parents, were playing, studying or making wise
jokes, and often reading the periodicals at that moment. As noted above, the
discourse in the periodicals between the lines paved the way for an abstraction of a
flexible duality made up of two groups of children: Those belonging to the middleclass,
with all the etiquette rules and appraisal of good manners in their household,
and the division of labour particular to the Republican nuclear family in modern
houses, and those perceived as “street children,” “homeless children,” “poor
children” who were definitely not the target population, but the objects who were just
read about in some stories in the periodicals by those middle-class children. The
readers either felt pity for them, as in Kemalettin Tugcu’s stories, or denigrated them
as “vagrant street children.” Before looking at the examples of how poor children
were objectified in the periodicals as the other side of the coin, we should mention
how the broader question of poverty took place in the children’s periodicals, as the
perception of “poor children” is not immune from the perception of the broader
question about poverty.
The discourse of poverty in children’s literature was not new as the question
of poverty had been a social concern for the Republican military officers, bureaucrats
and intellectuals since the establishment of the Republic, which was born to hard
economic conditions devastated by war. The efforts to create a national economy and
a national bourgeoisie together with the policies for industrialization under an open
136
economy had paved the way for a strong economic recovery until the 1929 World
Depression when conditions became harder due to the sharp decline in the prices of
agricultural commodities and the solution was found in protectionist policies and
etatism.204 But, “the reliance on protectionism and the resulting rents of scarcity as
the driving force of industrialization, coupled with the fact that real wages did not
exceed their 1914 levels despite considerable growth in the urban economy, sugests
that not only the rural-urban differences but also the inequalities within the urban
economy may have increased during the 1930s.”205 So, poverty was an important
social issue in the context of the 1930s and the hard economic conditions in daily life
through children were also reflected in the novels published in the 1930s.206
The discourse of poverty became more visible in the children’s periodicals
from the end of the 1930s towards the 1940s and this situation was embedded in the
socio-economic context of the Second World War. As Pamuk and Owen estimate,
even Turkey had not entered the Second World War, there was a full-scale
mobilization during war years and as imports had declined sharply and the
maintenance of the army required a great amount of financial power, there had been
a huge burden on the sectors of industry and agriculture. This condition paved the
way for a sharp decrease in GDP until 1945 and this was very dramatic as it stood at
35 percent compared to pre-war level.
Without the importation of raw materials, intermediate goods, and
machinery, earlier levels of production could not be sustained.
Manufacturing industry output declined by more than 35 percent
between 1939 and 1945. With the spread of bottlenecks and shortages,
black markets thrived, and stockpiling and profiteering spread. Under
204 Roger Owen and Sevket Pamuk, "Turkey, 1918-1945," in A History of the Middle East Economies
in the Twentieth Century (1998): 16.
205 Ibid: 28.
206 See for a summary of “poor child heroes” in the novels of 1930s: Alev Sınar, Hikaye Ve
Romanımızda Çocuk (1872-1950) (stanbul: ALFA, 1997): 48-55.
137
these circumstances, the government was forced to abandon earlier
plans for new investments in manufacturing industry. Another reason
for the abandonment of etatism was financial. Wartime expenditures
could not be met with the existing revenues, and the budget deficits
began to be financed by printing money. The result was spiraling
inflation, which accelerated the decline in the standard of living of the
great majority of the urban population.207
The wartime economic conditions since the beginning of the 1940s had
deteriorated and this was visible in children’s stories, especially about children being
forced to work at early ages in Çocuk Haftası that started to be published in 1943 by
Tahsin Demiray in Türkiye Publishing House.
In fact, the issue of “poor children” is an integral part of the “child question”
of the Republic, which is a broad social issue that includes concerns as summarized
by Libal: high infant and child mortality rates, a large number of orphaned,
abandoned and poor children, malnourishment and disease, child labor,
homelessness, begging, child abuse and abandonment, child prostitution and
delinquency.208 As she continues, the task of reconstruction belonged to both state
agencies and private associations throughout the 1920s. In 1930s, there were new
bends in child question due to the hard conditions with the onset of the Global
Depression:
according to those working in the government and many professional
elites, such social problems as child poverty and infant mortality were
to be met partly by state-funded projects in health and social welfare
and partly by civic associations and party branches. By the 1930s,
despite a period of normalization of daily life throughout the republic,
there remained the persistent question of how to cope best with
combatting disease, hunger, and malnutrition. With the onset of global
207 Owen and Pamuk, "Turkey, 1918-1945.", 25-26.
208 Kathryn Libal, "The Children's Protection Society: Nationalizing Child Welfare in Early
Republican Turkey," New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 23 (Fall 2000): 55. See also Resad Ekrem
Koçu, "Çocuk; Ailesiz, Kimsesiz Çocuklar," in stanbul Ansiklopedisi (stanbul: Koçu Yayınları,
1966): 4057-4059. Koçu writes that homeless street children has been a great problem for centuries.
And also, Koçu says that, since Tanzimat although children had been topics in the press, there was no
serious article about the child question.
138
depression, state and local efforts to recover from considerable
wartime losses suffered a further setback. Thus, in the 1930s the
conditions faced by many children still could be described as dire.209
So, there was a problem of “poor children” in the social scene of the society
in the 1930s as socio-economic context of Turkey shows us. But poverty and the
subject of “poor children” was not so visible in the children’s periodicals we have
observed in the 1930s as it was in the 1940s. The main reason behind this is related
to the priorites that took place in the periodicals. The children’s periodicals in the
1930s relied more on the mobilization of nationalism where efforts were made to
provide political socialization was by the exaltation of nationalist projects and
modernization efforts. As seen in the second chapter, the political discourse in the
periodicals in the 1930s was more laden with reference to the nation-state,
secularism, progress and disjunction with the past, the single-party and its
idealization for the eyes of the children. The reflection of social issues was not a
priority for the 1930s’ childrens’ periodicals which were saturated with the codes of
establishing the nation-state.
In the 1940s, especially with the onset of the Second World War, the concern
with the formation of the nation-state left its place more to socio-economic problems
that later undermined the hegemony of the Republican People’s Party and paved the
way for the multi-party period. The socio-economic worsening of conditions was
more visible when the hegemony of the one-party was slowly being undermined. The
children’s periodicals were not immune from the socio-economic context and as the
number of working and homeless children increased in real life because of the
increasingly diffucult conditions in the country, the subject of poverty started to take
gain a larger place in the metaphoric space in the stories of the periodicals.
209 Libal, "The Children's Protection Society: Nationalizing Child Welfare in Early Republican
Turkey.", 56.
139
But there is a significant point that should not be forgotten that will be
emphasized in the rest of this chapter: Although the issue of poverty took a greater
place in the children’s periodicals in the 1940s due to the socio-economic context
and it became more visible for the eyes of the middle-class children, so that there
was another world outside apart from their nuclear families and warm houses, it did
not take place as a “social” problem or as an issue of “social conflict.” Poverty was
presented as a “moral” issue and the solution to escape from poverty was also
defined on a “moral” plane, which means the stories in the periodicals emphasized
“good behaviour,” “honesty,” “kindness,” “studying hard,” and “owning good moral
values” as the real saviors of one from poverty. If one was rich, he had become rich
because of his good morals, not from “bribery” or “stockpiling.” And if one was
poor, in the end he would definitely become rich if he was a good man, helped
everyone, shared his few things with others and believed in faith210 throughout his
life.
As seen, poverty was perceived just as a moral issue which closed the doors
to the perception of it as belonging to the political arena of “social conflict” and so
was hiding the social inequalities in the society. The social conflicts in real life
between the rich and poor was compromised on a moral plane through consuming
the child hero or heroine in the stories in the periodicals where poor or homeless but
morally upright, goodhearted, hardworking children always won at the end and
became the objects of “success stories.” The authors in the periodicals wrote these
stories for middle-class children who were more inside the Republican vision of the
world. They were expected to take the same lesson from the stories: “The good will
always win in the end.” But in fact, the sentence was continuing between the lines in
210 It was in the context of the 1940s that the Republican sensitivity about secularism turned to be a
more flexible space and the religious cultural motifs came to be seen between the lines in the stories,
especially in those of Kemalettin Tugcu.
140
a politically unconscious sense: “The good will always win at the end, politics does
not matter.”
But here, there is a significant writer whose novels and stories paved the way
for a more complex situation: Kemalettin Tugcu. It would be wrong to evaluate his
stories as just ideologically conservative pieces hiding and covering the social
conflicts in society. He was a very popular author whose pieces did not just make
poverty visible more than any other writer of children’s literature of his time, but his
stories also taught children the notion of mercy, and awareness of other children
living in desparate conditions in the country. Whether or not he defined the social
inequalities on a moral plane, at least he continued to write about the poor throughout
his life for the eyes of all children in whose minds emerged the notion that “some
other children were out there, had to work a lot and were always hungry.” At least he
caused them to feel uneasy about those social inequalities. So, it would be a
deficiency to call him just a conservative writer; he in a way caused poverty to enter
into the minds of those children belonging to a middle-class life-style in apartment
flats.
“Lending A Helping Hand to the Poor”
As seen above, the onset of the Second World War and the bad socioeconomic
conditions following it were years when poverty started to become more
visible in the children’s periodicals. It was mostly seen in pieces about the exaltation
of charity in society and the appraisal of associations such as the Children’s
Protection Society and the Red Crescent.
141
Charity is a significant sphere to examine for the codes of the social structure
of society where the definiton of the poor -the population in need- and the rich paves
the way for an evaluation of the hegemonic political relationships in the society.
Especially the question of how social control and legitimacy were provided in a
particular context after the emergence of the modern state is not immune from the
dynamics of charity in society where the relationship between the donar and the
receiver reproduces the everyday practice of the hegemonic power(s). 211 In the case
of children’s periodicals, charity becomes a tool to educate children morally and
make them believe in the responsibilities that every member of the nation should feel
toward the “poor” members of the nation. “Helping the poor” becomes a moral issue,
it is not perceived as a situation that should give birth to political acts and policies
that have to be taken by the state. Efforts are made to strenghten this with pieces
about the heroism of some Republican elite who are depicted as always ready to lend
a helping hand to the poor:
In Topkapı, which is considered as one of the poor districts of stanbul,
has worked a philanthrophic foundation for 30 years. This foundation
has distributed winter food and fuel for heating to the poor of stanbul.
And like always, it has saved the poor numbering close to 100. This
philanthrophic foundation in Topkapı is one of the best private
organizations of this kind in Turkey. The well-working of this
foundation without ever its order being spoiled is the consequence of
only Dr. Galip Hakkı’s effort and work. This great man that the people
of Topkapı call “the father of the poor” struggled for 30 years to
provide them medicine, food and fuel as well as recovery of health and
last year he died. Dr. Galip Hakkı was a warrior of humanity and was
one of the real heroes who sacrificed his own life and suffered to stop
the pain of others. Almost every person belonging to the Turkish
nation is decent and loves helping the poor. In tomorrow’s big and
strong Turkey, this national character of ours will be more strongly
and clearly visible. Today’s Republican children that are growing up
211 See Nadir Özbek, Osmanlı mparatorlugu’nda Sosyal Devlet: Siyaset, ktidar ve Mesruiyet (1876-
1914) (stanbul: letisim, 2002).
142
in today’s such honorable examples of humanity will tomorrow all be
Galip Hakkıs, the father(s) of the poor.212
Libal, who bases her analysis on the contributions and limitations of the
Children’s Protection Society to the nationalist project, reminds us that,
“throughout the 1920s and 1930s, efforts to address the ‘child
question’ in terms of alleviating hunger, homelessness, and
exploitation through heavy labor were largely decentralized and not
well coordinated across state and private domains. Thus, efforts often
were undertaken simultaneously on local and national levels by private
philanthrophic associations, local municipal administrations, and the
state. The state vested power in the Ministry of Health and Social
Assistance and the Ministry of Education to establish infrastructural
reforms and concrete services that would benefit the republic’s
children”213
These activities usually took place and were announced in the periodicals, as
seen in the above example.214 But it was not just the activities of Children’s
212 “stanbul’un fakir semtlerinden biri sayılan Topkapı’da 30 yıldan beri bir hayır kurumu
çalısmaktadır. Bu kurum geçen hafta, semtin yoksullarına kıs yiyecekleri ve yakacakları dagıtmıstır.
Her zaman oldugu gibi gene yüze yakın yoksulu kurtarmıstır. Topkapıdaki bu yoksullara yardım
kurumu, Türkiyedeki bu çesit özel kurumların en iyi çalısanlarındandır. Bu kurumun bu kadariyi
çalısabilmesi ve otuz yıldanberi düzenini bozmayısı denilebilir ki sadece doctor Galip Hakkının
emegile, gayretile mümkün olmustur. Topkapı halkının (Yoksullar babası) adını verdikleri bu büyük
insane, o fakirler arasında, onlara sifa, saglık vermege ugrastıgı kadar, ilaç, gıda ve yakacak tedariki
için de tam 30 yıl ugrasmıs ve geçen yıl bu ay ölmüstür. Doktor Galip Hakkı insanlık yokunda
savasan ve insanların ıztıraplarını dindirmek çin kendiömrünü ıstıraba veren gerçek
kahramanlardandı. Türk milletinin hemen her ferdi fakirler babası doctor Galip Hakkı kadar insane
canlıdır ve düsküne yardım sever. Yarının büyük ve kuvvetli Türkiyesinde bu milli karakterimiz daha
kuvvetlive daha keskin olarak görülecektir. Bu kadar güzel insanlık örnekleriarasında yetisen
bugünün Cumhuriyet çocukları yarın hep birer Yoksullar babası doktor Galip Hakkı olacaklardır”,
"Cumhuriyet Çocugu Objektifinden, Yoksullar, Fakirler Babası Doktor Galip Hakkı," Cumhuriyet
Çocugu 1, no. 13 (1938): 207.
213 Libal, "The Children's Protection Society: Nationalizing Child Welfare in Early Republican
Turkey.", 59. The ‘child question’ was described as such by Kazım Karabekir: “Taking poor and
neglected children under the protection of the state and providing them with both a mental and
physical training and education that will render them as successful and strong as the other children of
the country”, “Yoksul ve bakımsız çocukları devlet himayesine alarak memleketin diger çocukları gibi
basarılı ve hayat mücadelesine kudretli kılacak maddi ve fikri bir talim ve terbiye ile donatmak”,
Kazım Karabekir, Çocuk Davamız, vol. 1, ed. Faruk Özerengin, (stanbul: Emre Yayınları, 2000): 9.
214 See also Rakım Çalapala, "Kızılay," Cumhuriyet Çocugu 2, no. 35 (1939): 170-171: “Kızılay
yurdun her kösesine el uzatmıs, yoksulları, zavallıları bir ana gibi kucaklamıstır. Kızılayın yüksek
degerini ve büyük hizmetini tanıyan halk ta onun yasaması ve yücelmesi için elinden geleni
esirgememistir. Bayram günleri gögüslerimizi Kızılay rozetlerile, mektuplarımızı Kızılay pullarile
süslüyoruz. Acı günlerde bizi düsünen bu hayır kurumunu biz de iyi günlerimizde hatırdan
çıkarmıyoruz. Kızılayla olan ilgimizi hergün biraz daha artırmalı, onun zenginlesmesi için elimizden
gelen her fedakarlıgı yapmalıyız!..Bütün Türk çocukları Kızılaya üye olmalı, onun için çalısmalı, onun
143
Protection Society or those activities of other private philanthrophic organizations
and initiatives announced in the periodicals; “being a person who is always ready to
lend a helping hand to the poor and people in need” was perceived as a cultural and
essential characteristic that every Turkish child had to have and it is because of this
that in children’s periodicals, poverty was always promoted as a situation that
required a moral solution through helping the poor and people in need rather than as
a political responsibility of the state.215
Departing from this point of the idealization of charity and the behaviour of
lending a helping hand to the “poor” as a lesson taught to middle-class children, now
we can move on to the issue of how those “poor” children were depicted in the
periodicals. In the stories, they were discribed through consuming the child object in
the stories who were sometimes denigrated as “vagrant and immoral children”
needing the moral guidance of literate middle-class adults and children,216 or were
sometimes praised as “poor but morally upright, hardworking, warmhearted, helpful
için fedakarlıga alısmalıdır. Kızılay için çalısmak yurt için çalısmaktır. Kızılay bayragı yoksulların,
yaralıların, felakete ugrayanların yarasını saran kutlu bir bagdır. Onu elimizden bırakmamalıyız.”
215 For example, in one of the stories, a middle-class man who sees a poor woman with her daughter in
the cold street begging, passes without giving them money, but he can not escape from the voice of
his conscience and regrets it very much: M. Oktay, "Kötü Bir Hareket," Çocuk Haftası, no. 181 (15
June 1946): 6, For other pieces and sentimental stories about the appraisal of helping the poor, see
"Adana Felaketzedelerine Bütün Genç Okullular Yardım Etmelidir, Sınıflarınızda Toplayacagınız
Paralar Büyük Yardımlar Yapabilir," Çocuk Sesi, no. 365 (21 December 1936): 2; "Yardımlasmada
Kardes Mahalleler," Cumhuriyet Çocugu 1, no. 12 (1938): 186; "Cumhuriyet Çocugu Objektifinden,
Cumhuriyet Çocuklarını Korumak, Yetistirmek çin Bugünün Büyükleri Nasıl Çalısıyorlar?,"
Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 12 (1938): 187; “Baba-Sevgili yavrularım. Yoksullara, dertlilere,
kimsesizlere yardım etmek bir insanlık ödevi, bir vatan borcudur…Onlar da bizim vatandasımızdır”,
.M. Hülagü, "Yardım-1 Perdelik Okul Piyesi," Çocuk Haftası, no. 13 (27 March 1943): 7; M. Oktay,
"Fakir nsanlar," Çocuk Haftası, no. 128 (9 June 1945): 6; Hamit Gündogdu, "Yemisler Olunca,"
Çocuk Haftası, no. 89 (9 September 1944):.6; Ekrem Bismil, "Hepimiz Böyle Olsak," Çocuk Haftası,
no. 173 (20 April 1946): 6.
216 See for example "Küçük Mahkumlar," Cumhuriyet Çocugu 2, no. 40 (1939): 263: “Küçük yasında
dogru yoldan ayrılarak bir takım kötü suçlar isleyen çcuklar; simdiye kadar Edirnedeki Terbiye Evine
gönderiliyordu. Cumhuriyet hükümetimiz küçük mahkumları büyüdükçe yurda çok iyi ahlaklı ve dogru
olarak yetistiren bu terbiye evi için, Ankarada Kızılcahamamda yeni ve modern büyük bir bina
yaptırmıs ve Edirneden tasıtmaga baslamıstır.”
144
and wise children working and sacrificing himself to earn the daily bread for his
family” as in Kemalettin Tugcu’s stories.
“If He Were A Good and Hardworking Child, He Would Not Have Remained Poor”
In a 1938 dated story in Cumhuriyet Çocugu, a middle-class child boy named
Altan whose moral values were described as very good, was portrayed one day as
going to his school. On his way, some “vagrant and dirty street children” on the road
tried to bother him:
We were in a narrow and empty street; it was 8:30 a.m. Three dirty
vagrant street children of the ages of 11-12, whose clothes were torn,
bothered and disturbed a clean boy dressed orderly of the same age
with them and going to his school. This well-mannered and decenthearted
student did not say anything to these street children making
rude remarks to him and kept on walking.217
But he would not continue to be silent as those street children got ruder and
threw trash on him: “If you were not a Turkish child, too, I would definitely punish
you. But if a Turkish child beats another Turkish child, this would be too sad. I hope
that one day you will be saved from the streets and feel sad at heart when you
remember what you have done.”218
The rest of the story continues with the self-realization of the leader of the
“idler vagrant street children” named Ali, who feels so ashamed and becomes friends
217 Dar, tenha bir sokaktayız: saat sabahın sekiz buçugu. On on ikiyaslarında üstleri yırtık pis üç
sokak çocugu küçük serseri, temiz giyinmis elinde çantası okuluna giden, gene kendi akranları bir
çocuga satasıyorlar. Temiz duygulu ve çok terbiyeli olan bu küçük okullu, kendisine bu sekilde söz
söyleyen bu sokak çocuklarına baska birsey söylemedi, yürüdü. Burhan Bilbasar, "Olmus
Hikayelerden: Kaldırım Mühendisi," Cumhuriyet Çocugu 1, no. 16 (1938): 276-278.
218 Altan’ın yüzü oldukça acımıstı. Acı acı bu sokak çocuguna bakarak yüzünü sildi.-Eger sen de
birTürk yavrusu olmasaydın, muhakkak ki senin cezanı verirdim. Fakat bir Türk çocugu diger bir
Türk çocugunu döverse bu çok acı olur. Dilerim ki, sen de bir gün sokaklardan kurtulasın; ve bu
yaptıklarını hatırladıkça iç üzüntüsü çekesin, Ibid: 276.
145
with Altan. Altan’s words make him come to his senses and understand that “he was
living such an ugly life. It was not possible to get rid of this life. He was just a street
vagabond and a very bad child.”219 But, in fact, he was an abandoned child who had
a hard childhood and had been beaten every day by his land lady and her children.
One day he had escaped from the house and it was at that time that his bad story in
the streets had begun. But, Altan had shaken him and had showed him the truth.
Altan invited Ali to his middle-class flat and introduced him to his “warmhearted”
mother, father and brother, who were in fact from the population that loved “lending
a helping hand to the poor.” Ali told his story to Altan’s father, who said “O little
Ali, you are not as bad a child as you think. A Turkish child does not become a bad
person in essence. Altan did very well to bring you here...Ali, let’s kill that idle and
bring that old little Ali back to life again.”
Ali never returned to the streets as he became a member of Altan’s “good,
open-hearted” family, who embraced him and he continued his education. In the end,
he became a hero of a success story by becoming a doctor in one of the children’s
protection societies in Turkey.
In this story, we see how the idealized, clean, mature middle-class Turkish
child Altan with his ideal Republican family embracing the “vagrant street-child”
becomes a model to that “idler, vagabond Ali” and makes him find the right moral
way that every Turkish child had to follow. But we wonder then, what happened to
the rest of Ali’s vagabond friends in the street? The author Bilbasar, a teacher, does
not mention them as the story progresses to tell a message to the readers, but the
street children called “vagabonds and idlers” in the story in fact become the objects
of other message pieces in the periodicals for the middle-class children reading them.
219 Ibid: 277.
146
Maybe they become thieves in the end while Altan saves himself from the streets by
following that Republican father’s advice.
Rakım Çalapala, "Küçük Hırsız,"
Çocuk Haftası, no. 165, (23 February 1946)
“Grab him, grab him! There’s a thief”!/Rang a voice in the street/The
police rushed together/Everybody was in wonder/Soon a thin
child/was caught../A line of men and women/was formed along the
road/Every other child looked at him/with timidity and
strangeness/They felt a deep pain/ Right in the depths of their
hearts/Every day he escaped from school/ Wandered around here and
there/ Now he was unemployed and hungry/ His age passed 15
already!/ “Well it is the result of idling!”/ Said an old woman/ “You
should already have a job!”/ “Why did you leave school, studying?”220
220 “Tutun, tutun! Hırsız var!”/Diye çınladı bir ses/Polisler kosustular,/Meraka düstü herkes/Biraz
sonra bir cılız/Çocuk yakalanmıstı.../Yol boyunca erkek, kız/Herkes sıralanmıstı/Bütün çocuklar
147
The miserable child that is seized by two policemen in the picture and the
crowd of ladies, men and children on the other side watching the event and feeling
pity for the poor child are in fact a reflection of the perception of poverty. The
hungry child that is accused of theft seems so miserable with his torn clothes and he
also seems so alien to the crowd watching him, they just criticize and feel pity for
him. The middle-class children holding the hands of their parents in the picture
belong to a safe area and there is an invisible boundary between them and the other
child. On the one hand, they feel pity for the poor child; on the other, they are
expected to relax as they go to school regularly and not run away so not to make the
same mistake as that poor child and fall into his situation. Poverty is attributed to the
child just because of his immoral and naughty behaviour and there is even a
discourse in the poem that finds it legitimate that a child could work in his childhood
and it is because of his laziness that he fell into such miserable conditions. The poor
child object is consumed to teach the middle-class children the lesson and warn them
not to run away from school and work and be lazy.221 The reason for poverty is once
more sought in the moral values of the people, not in socio-economic conflicts.
Those midddle-class faces are looking from an invisible window at those poor people
on the street and are feeling pity and wishing to lend a helping hand for them, but
also thinking that it is their own fault that they are like that. The dilemma was that,
on the hand, there was a tendency of inclusion as seen in the effort to instill the
baktı/Ona ürkek, yabancı/Gönüllerini yaktı/Anlatılmaz bir acı/Hergün okuldan kaçmıs/Surda, burda
dolasmıs/Simdi issizmis, açmıs/Yası on besi asmıs/“Haylazlıgın sonu bu! ”/Dedi yaslı bir
kadın/“Çalıssan ne olurdu, /“Neden okuldan kaçtın? ”, Rakım Çalapala, "Küçük Hırsız," Çocuk
Haftası, no. 165, (23 February 1946): 6.
221 Those I call middle-class children are not a unique group having the same features. I just try to
make a metaphor of the hegemonic class codes of especially the Republican intelligentsia;
bureaucrats, teachers, soldiers, doctors whose norms about educating the child for the sake of the
modern nation-state was similar to each other and so their children in a way were born into the similar
symbolic universes where their parents expected from them similar idealized dignified behaviour and
moral patterns.
148
virtues of charity to children; but on the other hand there was a tendency of exclusion
which otherized those poor children as “vagrant street children”.
In another story written by Orhan Olay in Yavrutürk in 1942, a dialogue
between Mr. Naci and two porters is presented.222 Mr. Naci is a rich man with a
beautiful house in Bebek. He is a director in a big bank. One day he hears two porters
standing in front of a wall, complaining about their hard work and saying that the
rich are unjustly living in comfort while they live in such hard conditions. He calls
them upstairs, takes them in and after giving them lunch, coffee and cigarettes, he
wants to give them a lesson:
-Now I am going to ask you some questions, he said and asked one of
the porters: What was your father’s job?-He was a farmer, -Why didn’t
you become a farmer too?-Because farming is very difficult. One must
work hard all day from dawn until noon on the farm.
He asked the other: -And what was your father like?-He was a
repairman.-And then why did you not become a repairman like your
father?-Is repairmanship a job?!! Work hard all day from dawn till
night with saw and adz!!!223
After getting these answers, Mr. Naci makes a long speech in which he tells
the two porters how poor he was in his childhood, but how he started working hard
and took care of the household to earn the daily bread of the family. He told them
how he had worked with his brother even in Europe as a waiter and managed to
make some money for his education. But the more significant sentences come after
this:
-You see how difficult my life was? But at the end I became
successful. If you had worked hard and gone to school like me, too,
you would be as successful as me and would live in comfort like me.
Now you understand why I have earned such money. I am given the
222 Orhan Olay, "Çalısan Kazanır," Yavrutürk 12, no. 16 (7 February 1942): 3.
223 Simdi size bazı seyler soracagım!dedi. Hamallardan birine:-Senin baban neci idi?diye sordu. –
Çiftçi idi.-Sen ne diye çiftçi olmadın?-Çiftçilik zordur da ondan. Sabahtan aksama kadar tarlada
çalısmak lazım. Digerine sordu:-Senin baban neci idi?-Marangozdu.-Sen ne diye marangoz
olmadın?-Marangozluk ta is mi? Sabahtan aksama kadar elinde testere, keser ugras ta ugras. Ibid.
149
prize of my efforts. And you are given the punishment for your
laziness. If you had worked enough, one of you would have owned a
big farm, and the other would have been owned a furniture factory.
The eyes of the two porters got wet. Both of them said: -Right! We
now understand why you are in comfort and we are in misery. While
they were leaving, Mr. Naci gave both of them some money: - Spend
this money for the education of your children! At least they won’t be
like you.224
As seen in this story, the perception about socio-economic welfare is linked
just to one’s working hard, and poverty and misery are in the same way perceived as
the result of laziness. Poverty is perceived as the fault of the poor people themselves.
According to the Republican rich man giving a lesson to the poor “because of
laziness” porters, if they had worked hard enough in their childhood and youth, they
would now have been as rich as he. This perception paves the way for an
understanding of wealth being a definite destination if one behaves properly, just
studies and works hard to arrive there. Wealth is perceived as if it is available to
everyone, as if everyone has the same right and opportunity to have it if they fulfill
the requirements. Even if there is a perception that the state has to help the poor, it is
just within the boundaries of charity. It is not a political condition requiring the
responsibilities of the state towards the socio-economic inequalities in the country.
And also, wealth is legitimized as a measure of success; this is why all the heroes in
the stories become rich at the end if they study, work hard and lend a helping hand to
others in need throughout their lives.
224 Görüyorsunuz ya neler çektim? Fakat sonunda muvaffak oldum. Siz de çalıssaydınız, okusaydınız
muvaffak olur, benim gibi rahat yasardınız. Simdi benim nedeen çok para kazandıgımı anladınız ya?
Ben çektigim emeklerin mükafatını görüyorum. Siz tenbelligin cezasını çekiyorsunuz. Çalıssaydınız
biriniz büyük bir çiftlik, digeriniz de bir mobilya fabrikasının sahibi olurdunuz. ki hamalın gözleri
ıslandı. kisi de:-Dogru! Dediler. Simdi neden sizin rahatlık, bizim de sefalet içinde oldugumuzu
anladık. Kapıdan çıkarlarken Bay Naci ikisine de para vermisti:-Bu parayı çocuklarınızın okumasına
sarfedin! dedi.Hiç olmazsa, onlar sizin gibi kalmasın. Ibid. For other examples about criticism of
laziness and how Republican children would have to be always hardworking and successful by also
behaving morally good as the children of a great nation, see M.Hülagü, "yilik Ve Fenalık," Çocuk
Haftası, no. 8 (20 February 1943): 12-14; and Adnan Erim, "Tembel Çocuk," Çocuk Haftası, no. 169
(23 March 1946):11, M.Fazıl Ülküer, "Küçük Hüseyin," Çocuk Haftası, no. 139 (25 August 1945): 6.
150
But there is a significant dilemma to be highlighted here. Even if wealth is
defined as the measure of success in the general outlook of the stories, the writers,
especially the publishers belonging to the Republican intelligentsia, in fact tried to
put some distance between their discourse and the praise of wealth because the
Republican intelligentisa did not advocate an open wealth. The statist economic and
social policies of the Republican People’s Party especially since 1932225 being
embedded in the solidaristic understanding of Turkish economy and culture did not
allow wealth to be praised by any means. The individualism of liberalism was
rejected as well as the class conflict226 and this means that although individual effort
was perceived as the ultimate way to arrive at the destination of wealth in the
children’s periodicals, the Republican economic policies attributed the real agency to
the state where the individual effort was just added to the common good for the
welfare of the nation.227
Looking at the 1923 zmir Economy Congress, we see that the most general
decision that came out as a result was a demand for a mixed economy in which the
state would be responsible for big initiatives.228 This means, the real economic actors
that would establish the nation-state would be both the state and private initiative. As
Keyder writes, “the economic applicaations of statism paved the way for the increase
in industrial production through the homogenous coalition of bureaucrats and the
industrial bourgeoisie. In a period when the enlargement of national industry caused
225 Owen and Pamuk, "Turkey, 1918-1945."
226 Parla, Ziya Gökalp, Kemalizm Ve Türkiye'de Korporatizm, 8.
227
See Fulya Özkan, "A Discourse About Normalization or Fantasy and Its Reflections on Everyday
Life: A Cultural-Historical Analysis of Two Popular Magazines of the 1950s, Bütün Dünya and
Hafta" (MA Thesis, Bogaziçi University, 2004). for the individual initiative taking the place of the
state in the context of the 1950s and Democrat Party power.
228 Erik Jan Zürcher, Modernlesen Türkiye'nin Tarihi (stanbul: letisim, 1995): 284.
151
more political control on the economy, the interests of these two groups were in
harmony.”229 So, the statist policies advocated private initiative to create a national
economy with the leadership of a national bourgeoisie.
But the main point is that the state was the real agent in the process. The state
would be responsible for big projects and had the right to interfere in the private
initiative in which the government had paid encouragment incentives. The state, on
the one hand, needed the private initiative of the newly emerging bourgeoisie to
create the national economy, but, on the other hand, the Republican People’s Party
was trying to maintain some distance with the bourgeoisie and wanted to keep its
control and legitimacy mechanisms, despite the complex relationships where the
boundary between the bureaucrats and the bourgeoisie was becoming blurred, many
bureaucrats were also taking roles in the economy as partners of private initiatives.
This is why there was no boundless appraisal of wealth in the children’s
periodicals although it was perceived as the measure of success. Wealth was
perceived as definitely the most successful route one would want to have if he
behaved properly and saved money in his childhood by studying and working hard.
But it was again limited in the discourse by attributing it the right to be owned only
by “good and morally upright behaviour”. There was not an individual success taken
in the sense of free market economy, the success was only due to the morality of
corporatist and solidarist economy where one did not work just for himself but for
229 “Devletçiligin iktisadi uygulamaları, bürokratlar ile sanayi burjuvazisinin homojen bir koalisyon
içinde birlesmesiyle sanayi üretiminin artmasına yol açtı. Yerli sanayi sektörünün büyümesinin
ekonomi üzerinde siyasi kontrolün artamsıyla sonuçlandıgı bir dönemde, bu iki grubun çıkarları
birbirine denk düstü”, Çaglar Keyder, Türkiye'de Devlet Ve Sınıflar (stanbul: letisim, 1999): 149.
152
the welfare of the nation by never sacrificing moral behaviour like lending a helping
hand to the poor.230
Poor but Honest!231
Up to now, we have seen poor “street-children” and poor people who were
just objects of pity and an invisible exclusion because they were vagrant and unaware
of their responsibilites. It was their own fault if they remained poor because of
laziness, bad manners etc. But as discussed above, poor children were not just
perceived as vagrant street children who had to be educated and guided for the
welfare of the nation.
Poor children were in fact were perceived in the stories more as honest,
mature, hardworking, wise and good-hearted children who were innocent and just
victims of fate. In the end they would always gain because of their good manners and
hard life struggle in the streets. So, in fact the metaphors of poor children in most of
the stories were consumed by the writers to teach the middle-class children reading
them the virtues of being a modest and obedient people. In these cases, the children
were not denigrated as “vagrant street children” to be avoided, but were praised as
little heroes, as the victims of fate by a very dramatic discourse. Again, there was
discourse of socio-economic inequalities and conflicts in society; poverty was just a
moral issue.
230 For examples about the comparison of rich men, some of whom are good, hardworking and
generous men and so always gain in life and some of whom are stingy or extravagant, dishonest,
insensitive, thoughtless or just think of themselves even if they don’t give harm to others and so lose
in life, see Ahmet Ekrem, "Babaların Günahı," Çocuk Sesi, no. 325 (16 March 1936): 8-9, F. Mahmut
Ülküer, "Tüccarın Verdigi Ders," Çocuk Haftası, no. 148 (27 October 1945): 11, M. Oktay, "ki
Zengin," Çocuk Haftası, no. 157 (29 December 1945): 14.
231 Fakir ama Gururlu!
153
In one of the stories published in Cumhuriyet Çocugu in 1938, the writer took
the metaphor of poor children as his subject and exalted them as victimized
children:232 “These little children who had to earn their lives by their own efforts,
were holding their old, very thin jackets very tightly, and shivering, had formed
small group.”233 These children were described in the story as trying to sell
newspapers in very cold weather. One of them was crying because another vagrant
child had stolen his newspapers. A bureaucrat teacher, Burhan Bilbasar, passes in
front of him in the story as told by Öykümen and after asking the child some
questions and trying to measure if he was lying or not, he gives the child some
money and says that he was giving that money as a loan. The child becomes very
happy and the rest of the story continues with the exaltation of the hardworking child
who both goes to school and sells newspapers and in the end finds Bilbasar to pay
him back. The child is described as a mature person who rejects the money as a
prize for him to go to a cinema from Bilbasar as the child says he could not go to the
cinema when there were so many other poor children in the streets: “Thank you, Mr.
Gentleman. Forgive me, I would be very happy to take this gift from you, but I can
not go to a movie with this money, because we have friends who can not work and
need this money.”234
As seen, the poor child is described in this story as an innocent and wise
figure whose behaviour should be taken as a model. This is a mainstream perception
232 For a broader analysis of the discourse of victimized childhood in nineteenth century Victorian
England, see Laura C. Berry, “Introduction: The Rise of the Child Victim and the State of the Novel”
in The Child, the State, and the Victorian novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989).
233 Hayatlarını kendi emekleriile kazanmak zorunda kalan bu küçük yavrular, incecik eski ceketlerine
sıkı sıkı sarılmıslar, titreserek küçük bir küme olusturmuslardı., A. Öykümen, "Kendi Kendisinin
Çocukları," Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 13 (1938): 218.
234 Çok tesekkür ederim Bay Amca. Eni bagıslayın sizing bu hediyenizi almayı çok isterdim. Fakat bu
para ile sinemaya gidemeyecegim. Çünkü böyle yardımlara ihtiyacı olan ve çalısamayan
kardeslerimiz var., Ibid: 220.
154
about “poor but honest” child figure which can be observed in other stories, too. For
example, in another story, a boy named Dündar, “who was the poorest but very
good-hearted, serious and hardworking child of his class”235 gives a lesson to his
naughty friends in the class while they were fighting and makes them ashamed of
themselves with his very mature words. In another one, a little poor child named
Turgut, working as a porter in the cold weather with torn clothes and shoes, carries
the luggage of a customer. While they are walking, the customer asks him questions
and Turgut tells his bitter life story. He tells him how his mother, father and aunt
have died and how he is alone in life. The customer is very touched and undertakes
the responsibility to educate him and every month gives him some money for his
education. Turgut becomes a very hardworking student who wants to be a merchant
and the story finishes with the words of the happy customer: “Do you see these little
Turkish children! How they still work as soon as they find the opportunity and save
themselves even if they are left homeless in the street...”236
But certainly, the most significant name behind narratives about the life
struggle of poor street children was Kemalettin Tugcu. His writings about poor
children and people, which did not have much literary value but were written by such
a grief-stricken language giving birth to pity, mercy and teardrops in child-readers,
were definitely the most popular ones in the periodicals published by Demiray’s
Türkiye Publishing House.
235 A. Öykümen, "yi Arkadas," Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 11 (1938): 172-173. See also "Hayat," Çocuk
Haftası, no. 154 (8 December 1945): 14 for the exaltation of working children.
236 Görüyor musun su Türk yavrularını, sokaklara bile düsseler fırsat bulur bulmaz nasıl çalısıyor ve
kendilerini kurtarıyorlar…”, A. Öykümen, "Küfeci Çocuk," Cumhuriyet Çocugu, no. 36-37 (1939):
209.
155
Tugcu’s Poor and Morally Upright Children
In a cold rainy day, I was walking down the Ankara Avenue. A poor
old man with a little boy holding his hand was walking in front of me.
The shoes of the little boy were crooked, had turned white because of
being rubbed and had holes in their bottom. Rain washed the shoes of
the child and the child turned to the old man and said: ‘Look Grandad!
They became like new.’ I could understand the weakness and pain of
the old man at that moment. It was this emotion that made me write
the novel “Poor Grandfather.”237
Kemalettin Tugcu started to work in Türkiye Publishing House in 1932 by the
help of family friends’ personal contact with Demiray. At first he was doing
technical work in the printing house and also he was making translations of different
pieces.238 His real career in writing started in Yavrutürk when he had left doing
technical work of the printing house and focused on writing in both children’s
periodicals and pieces oriented towards adults especially women such as Ev-s of
Türkiye Publishing House.
Tugcu wrote many different things throughout his life.239 The general subject
of them was the life-struggle of poor, abandoned, runaway or painful children in bad
families with step fathers or step mothers where they won at the end through their
good manners, honesty, bravery and belief in faith. But the main distinction of Tugcu
with this subject was his success in romanticizing poverty and hunger as the effect of
poverty.
This is the point where we see the double effect of Tugcu’s stories. In one
way, he gave birth to emotions of mercy and pity in reader children and made them
237 The sentences are quoted from Kemalettin Tugcu by his niece Nemika Tugcu who wrote Tugcu’s
biography, Nemika Tugcu, Sırça Köskün Masalcısı, Kemalettin Tugcu'nun Yasam Öyküsü (stanbul:
Can Yayınları, 2004): 172.
238 Their names were Hava Yarısı, zciler Kralı, Araba ile Dünya Turu.Ibid: 176.
239 Nemika Tugcu gives a list of all his published books. Ibid: 232.
156
understand that there was not just their world going on, there were other children and
people living in very hard conditions outside and so made poverty more visible to the
eyes of children. Children who were reading the entertainment pages or other pages
oriented towards a middle-class life style, were also reading his pieces and were
facing the world of poverty from a poor child’s eyes in his stories. The words I
quoted from him telling the motivation behind his novel Poor Grandfather (Zavallı
Büyükbaba) prove his sincerity about his sensitivity to poverty in fact. Poverty was
an issue in his head but the problem was that he was problematizing it as just a moral
issue.
The world of poverty written by Tugcu in such a romantic language and by a
narrative defining the moral plane as the guide to be rescued from poverty was
problematic in the same sense of other writers’ problematic definition of poverty
immune to a political socio-economic value. His hero poor children in his stories
were very good-hearted, sensitive, honest children who believed in faith and solution
to poverty in this sense was problematized again as an individual issue. If the child
struggled enough without sacrificing his good manners and belief in faith, at the end
he would gain and again like most of the other writers, the measure of success in his
stories was generally defined by the hero’s getting rich. In this sense, although he has
a different place in children’s literature because of his much effort in depicting
poverty to children in his many pieces for years, his depiction carried the same
problem of defining poverty just on the moral plane.
His most significant narratives about poor children in the 1930s and 1940s
were the ones published in Çocuk Haftası. In fact, he had started writing in
Yavrutürk but apart from a story named The Golden Bracelet240 about a poor little
240 Kemalettin Tugcu, "Altın Bilezik, Bir Küçük Sanatkarın Romanı.", Yavrutürk, no. 207 (13 April
1940): 296.
157
boy entering into a job near an ironworker, learning the delicacies of ironworking by
working hard with honour through years like his master and setting up his own
business at the end, he had written national stories in Yavrutürk. The real pieces
about poor children and their life struggle were published in the 1940s in Çocuk
Haftası and the most popular of them were, The Poor Grandafather(Zavallı
Büyükbaba-1943), The Little Newspaperseller(Küçük Gazeteci-1944), Homeless
Children(Kimsesiz Çocuklar-1945), The Bazaar of Children(Çocuk Pazarı-1945)
and The Mother’s Darling(Anasının Kuzusu-1946).
In The Poor Grandfather published between 2 January 1943 and 17 July
1943, Tugcu tells the story of the life struggle of a little child named Necdet and his
grandfather. “They had neither materials for heating, nor food, clothes and
money.”241 They had noone to help them apart from the coffee seller smail. One
day, their house burns and the grandfather who had gone out to look for bread, gets
lost, and while was freezing to death, was found and put in the hospital. But when he
gets well and departs from the hospital, his house and Necdet was not there yet any
more. He starts to look for Necdet and throughout that time, while he was starving
and freezing to death, another poor man finds him and takes him to his home.
Although this family was very poor, too, they share their bread with the old man and
one day they win a great deal of money from the lottery. Their praisworthy behaviour
of helping the old man despite their own poverty was rewarded by this lottery in the
story.
The old man too was a very good and morally outstanding person and the
poor family had believed that he was an Hızır. At that time, Necdet was trying to find
his grandfather and trying to earn his bread by carrying the luggages of people in the
241 Onların ne yakacakları, ne giyecekleri, ne yemekleri, ne de paraları vardı, Kemalettin Tugcu,
"Zavallı Büyükbaba," Çocuk Haftası, no. 1 (2 January 1943): 13.
158
bazaar. He knew his responsibilities very well. Once, he was raised by very good
morals by his grandfather and this is why he finds a wallet full of money when he
was so much in need but had given it to its owner. He knew his responsibilities very
well and once when a boy had asked him why he did not go to school, Necdet
answers him as such: “Who will look after my grandfather when I go to school? Who
will earn the money? I do not have a mother, a father and a home like you. I have to
work”242
One day Necdet and his grandfather meet again by chance in the street and
continue their life struggle together. But they never give up from their good morals
and belief in faith. At the end of the story they get the reward of their good and
honest behaviours. One of their neighbours builds them a home, another one gives
them his cow and the Grandfather finds a job, starts to go to his work everyday and
seems younger than. Necdet starts the middle school and the story ends with these
last words of the Grandfather: “Yes my son, the pains suffered at the end are
forgotten; but the good behaviours are never.”243
Another story named The Homeless Children published between 26 May
1945 and 10 November 1945 , tells the story of poor abandoned children living
together in the streets and trying to earn their bread by carrying the luggages of
people. The basic point of this story is again the belief that “God gives the fortune of
everyone.”244 In this story too, the children never sacrifice from good morality and
honesty, they later pay the money of the peach they had stolen because of hunger,
they give back a ring they find to its owner and they live by sharing their even little
242 Kemalettin Tugcu, "Zavallı Büyükbaba," Çocuk Haftası, no. 29 (17 July 1943). 13, 27 March
1943: 13.
243 Ibid: 14.
244 Kemalettin Tugcu, "Kimsesiz Çocuklar," Çocuk Haftası, no. 135 (28 July 1945): 14.
159
food with each other and others in need. They gain the love of many people and
especially one of them called Çakır , the oldest and strongest of the boys helps the
police in a case and the police headquarters offers him first to be their secret agent
and then wants him to join the police because of his success in helping the police.245
At the end of the story, one of the boys Mehmet finds his family who was in fact rich
and starts to live with them and he takes one of the boys near him and Çakır goes to
Police College and they all get rid of the life in the streets. “The homeless children
were wanted by everyone now. Each of them started to work hard to become the
good adults of the future”246
In The Little Newspaperseller published between 19 June 1944 and 23
September 1944, we read the story of a little child named Ali selling newspapers by
getting up very early at 4 a.m. and selling newspapers to those “houses having
smiling faced, cleanly dressed maids”247 till 8 a.m. when he goes to school. After
school he continues selling newsapers and by the money he earns, he looks after his
dismissed father and mother and sister. They live in a miserable house in Unkapanı.
One day, Ali’s father was accused by murder and the rest of the story continues with
Ali’s success in finding the real murderer. Ali had said to his father that, “Do not
think about us dad, you have a son who is like a lion”248 and he had proved in the
245 As it is seen, here Tugcu reproduces the belief in the power of the state through the appraisal of
obedience and help to the police. The police are perceived as brave people and heroes fighting to find
the real quilty and so helping to the police becomes a sign of bravery and good behavior. For example,
in The Little Newspaperseller, the father says to his son that “They say you have had a great deal of
help to the police, the police wants to give you a qualified education. They will get you educated and
make you a civil police. I said to them that, “He is my son but it he belongs to the nation, do what you
think suitable is”, Kemalettin Tugcu, "Küçük Gazeteci," Çocuk Haftası, no. 77 (17 June 1944).
246 Tugcu, "Kimsesiz Çocuklar." Çocuk Haftası, no. 150: 14.
247 Yüzü sevimli, üstü bası temiz pak hizmetçili evler. Tugcu, "Küçük Gazeteci.", 6.
248 Ibid., 22 July 1944, no. 82, 12-13.
160
story with his mature behaviours, bravery and success that he was a mature child and
he was really like a lion.
The Mother’s Darling published between 11 May 1946 and 12 October 1946
was a story about a child named Adnan and his mother falling into hard life
conditions when their family living in a rich house becomes scattered. The son takes
the responsibilities of his mother and sister and starts to both work and study. In later
years, the spoiled rich students in the university exclude him because of his silent and
morally upright behaviours. But the story has a good conclusion as the others and
find a good job and marry with a girl named Nuran who does never leave him
although she was very rich. Throughout the story, the mother always gives the same
message of passion. Once when Adnan fights with a rich but spoiled friend in the
school, his motjer says to him that “ Poor people like us must be more patent and
able to endure offenses.”249 In this story we also meet with the depiction of richness
in a double way: The rich but spoiled students in the university and the rich but
morally high-qualified Nurdan to whom Adnan gets married. Tugcu depicts richness
as a condition to be spoiled and to behave like a dandy. But it is not an absolute
depiction as we also meet with rich but morally qualified people believing in faith
and always lending a helping hand to the poor as we see in Nurdan.
And finally, one of the most sensitive stories of Tugcu in terms of the
depiction of poverty can be mentioned: The Bazaar of Children published between
11 May 1946 and 12 October 1946. The depiction of poverty here becomes more
visible with the details given about hunger.
The Bazaar of Children is about a poor woman annd her husband who have to
give their 3 children to people as they could not look after them. The mature child
249 Bizim gibi fakir insanlar daha tahammüllü olmalıdır. Kemalettin Tugcu, "Anasının Kuzusu,"
Çocuk Haftası, no. 196 (28 September 1946): 4.
161
who have to give a difficult life struggle in this story is the oldest of the children:
Ayse. She is excluded by her father in the family as her father sees her as an illomened
person because of the bad events they have encountered since Ayse’s birth.
The story continues with Ayse’s efforts to get her brother and sister from the rich
families to whom the children were given. Throughout the story Ayse falls into
miserable conditions as she is denigrated and excluded by everyone. But hers is a
success story like the other child heroes of Tugcu. At the end everybody becomes
ashamed of their behaviors towards her because this good-mannered, morally upright
and good-herated girl had given them a lesson by her goodness. She had always been
honest. And one day she gets the reward of her good, hardworking and dutiful
behaviours and an old woman to whom she had helped, shares her house with
Ayse’s family and Ayse’s family moves to her house. After they move to that house,
the life of the family changes and the family now starts to save gradually some
money and get richer. Ayse, who had been a very wise and dutiful girl, had saved
some money by working outside and had opened a shop by this money: “Ayse was
now like a daughter of a middle-class family…Ayse, who was shown as a model of
badness in the other district was now the representative of goodness and hardwork.
Some fathers and mothers showed her as an example to their sons and daughters and
were saying to them that, “-You are not studying well, but look at Ayse, she earns the
bread of her family in this age”250 And in another place, Tugcu wrote that, “That’s
the way it is! If the little Ayse had not sacrificed herself to work by giving it her all
in such hard conditions to earn money for her family, who would look after them?
250 Ayse simdi ortahalli bir ailenin kızı gibi gezmeye baslamıstı...öteki mahallede kötülük örnegi
sayılan Ayse, bu yeni tasındıkları mahallede çalıskanlıgın, iyiligin bir örnegi idi. Bazı babalar ve
anneler ogullarına, kızlarına onu gösteriyor “ Siz dogru dürüst okumuyorsunuz, bakınız Ayse bu yasta
ev geçindiriyor” diyor,Kemalettin Tugcu, "Çocuk Pazarı," Çocuk Haftası, no. 170 (30 March 1946):
4-5.
162
She worked, rescued her mother and father from begging for alms and eventually set
up a good business by her intelligence and honesty.”251 Again here, the conception of
a “working child” is reflected as a natural phenomena by Tugcu. The child is
appraised by her working; “a working child” is not problematized. And also, we hear
a similar voice about poor people from the mouth of poor people themselves. The
mother Zehra says that “Poor people must be devoid of arrogance…They are rich
people, they do not even be aware about the amount of money they give us.”252
This story among the others is also very significant in terms of the depiction
of hunger. The dramatic sentences about food written from the perception of hungry
people and children increase the emotional effect of the stories. For example, the rich
house that Ayse saw when she had gone to take her brother Ahmet is described as
such: “...The upstairs was covered with blankets. The household was having
breakfast. The toast and the tea were smelling so delicious. Ayse saw a big table.
There were breads covered with butter and different kinds of jam on the table.
Although there was daylight, the light was on and the samovar was rattling lightly
with steam and the people all dressed well were gathering there to have breakfast.”253
Hunger was really told in detailed sentences in a high proportion in Tugcu’s
stories. In this story, Ayse’s family remains hungry for days and Tugcu writes a lot
251 Öyle ya Aysecik çalısmasaydı, Aysecik canını disine takarak karda kısta para kazanmak için canını
ortaya atmasaydı, onlara kim bakacaktı? O çalısmıs, anasını, babasını el açmaktan kurtarmıs, nihayet
akıllılıgı, dürüstlügü yüzünden bir is sahibi olmustu, Ibid., no.173, (20 April 1946): 5.
252 Fakirler azıcık kibirsiz olmalıdır...onlar zengin insanlar. Bize verdikleri parayı duymazlar bile,
Ibid, no. 154, (8 December 1945): 4.
253 ...Yukarısı halılarla döseliydi. Ev halkı kahvaltı ediyordu. Kızarmıs ekmekle çay misk gibi
kokuyordu. Ayse büyük bir masa gördü. Üstünde tereyagı sürülmüs ekmekler, reçeller vardı. Gündüz
oldugu halde kocaman elektrik yanıyor, semaver tıkırdıyor, bacasından bugu çıkıyor,hepsi çok iyi
giyinmis olan insanlar kahvaltı etmek için orada toplanıyorlardı,Ibid, no. 154, (8 December 1945): 4.
163
of details about how they wanyed bones from the butcher by claiming that they were
for the dogs but were boiling the bones and eating them themselves.254
In fact, hunger is not just a condition increasing the dramatic moment of
poverty in the stories. While making an analysis about the familiar figure of the
child victim, its dominance, its various forms, and its importance to Victorians’s
ideas of self and state in ninetenth-century English writing, Laura Berry arrives at
interesting conclusions about the usage of hunger in these writings:
Early and mid-Victorian concerns about changes in social rank are
articulated in many ways, one of the most important of which is
hunger...In many of these writings, children are crucial to mediating
anxieties about hungry others because the representation of
endangered children allows the transformation of powerful adult
appetites into the pitiable needs of an innocent(and therefore socially
pure) victim. In other instances, the representation of hunger brings
social anxieties to the foreground without imaginatively resolving
them.255
According to Berry, the child as the victim in the narrative as the hungry
object, reduces the tension about the symbolic world of poverty hidden behind the
metaphor of hunger. The image of the hungry adult is more open and direct to
remind the social inequalities in the society whose effect is hunger in the narrative
but when the correlation is between the child and hunger, those tensions turn to be
more universalistic sensitivities and objects of mercy. The anger about the social
inequalities turns to be more an issue of pity and mercy directed towards an innocent
object. “If a besetting problem of the early Victorian period is the presence of hungry
bodies, a (partial) representational solution is the endangered child. Novels and social
documents sometimes transform, or try to transform, the dangerous hungers of
powerful adults into the blameless and pitiable needs of infant victims. Thus, factory
254 Ibid, no. 157, (29 December 1945): 4.
255 Laura C. Berry, "Introduction: The Rise of the Child Victim and the State of the Novel.", 5.
164
reform finds success in advertising the labors of children rather than the hardships
endured by adult workers, and doctors turn away from discussing the fear of the
lower-class wet nurse’s bodily fluids to focus for the starving infant’s life. In
substituting innocent children for potentially dangerous adults, these texts might be
said to manage the threat by displacing it.”256
Looking at Kemalettin Tugcu, we can not say that there is an open attitude of
him to use hunger to transform the societal tensions to soft emotions of pity and
mercy. But, remembering Zizek that what makes something ideological, is not the
desire behind it but the implication of that desire257, although Tugcu seems sincere
about the real existence of his hero victim children whom he finds innocent from the
beginning, his writings at the end imply poverty and hunger and social conflicts to be
defined on the soft plane of pity and mercy devoid of any political value. Poverty and
hunger are rather moral problems for him than social ones.
As Tugcu has written for long years and has been one of the most significant
writers in children’s literature since the end of the 1930s, he has been the subject of
many debates. Some saw him as a writer advertising richness by showing just the
direction of wealth to get rid of poverty and unhappiness258, some saw him a very
wortwhile writer who was the source of interest and mercy towards the poor people’s
lives259 and so was making child readers meet with other worlds other than their
narrow middle-class homes. As Tugcu rejected to be remembered by any political
256 Ibid: 10.
257 Slovaj Zizek, "Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism," New Left
Review, no. 225 (1997): 30.
258 Efe Bahçecibası, "Kemaletttin Tugcu'dan nciler," Selam Ümit Nesline (March 1987): 23.
259 Qouted from an interview with Orhan Pamuk, "Kemalettin Tugcu'nun Romanlarıyla Nasıl
Karsılastınız?," Aydınlık 5 May 1993 by Nemika Tugcu, Tugcu, Sırça Köskün Masalcısı, Kemalettin
Tugcu'nun Yasam Öyküsü, 204.
165
issue, he was a writer to whom everyone reacted according to their political
tendencies because Tugcu did not mention his political standing understood in the
popular sense. But when we look at his desire to instill the ideas of a modern dutiful
and morally upright citizenship to children and remember his respect towards the
state and the notion of discipline260, we can see that despite his much focus on
poverty in such socio-economically hard years of the Second World War Turkey, his
political character was in harmony with his state. His focus on the belief in destiny
and faith and his depiction of a traditional stanbul family life in streets with old
hosues and mosques also illuminate our mind about his conservatism. As Necdet
Neydim quotes, Tugcu said “I am a person committed to his beliefs and past. I do not
like changes and surprises.”261 Maybe, this is why his child heroes were ordinary
children talking mature words about life but devoid of any interesting features and
imaginative power262 in fact.
But although Tugcu was reproducing the perception of poverty to be defined
on the moral plane and so paving the way for emotions of mercy rather than thoughts
about socio-economic inequalities to arise in children’s minds in his narratives and
was showing only the morally upright behaviours to get rid of poverty and get rich at
260 Aslı Yakın, "Çesme Sokagının Kayıp Çocukları: Kemalettin Tugcu Romanları Ve Disiplin,"
Kebikeç, no. 19 (2005): 189-209. See also Tugcu’s distinction between the urban and the countryside.
261 Necdet Neydim, "Çocuk Edebiyatında Kemalettin Tugcu Gerçegi," in Çocuk Edebiyatı (stanbul:
Bu Yayınevi, 2003): 150.
262 Bu metinlerin çocukları, ne Küçük Prens gibi fil yutmus bir yılan resmi çizerler, ne de Keloglan
gibi çalılara ve kugulara sarkı söylemeyi ögretirler. Çocuk bu romanlarda, Çocuklar Gemisi’nde
adadn kurtulmak için bir gemi yapmayı öneren kızlar gibi istisnalar dısında hayal gücünden yoksun
bir varlık olarak durur. Anasının kulagından dogar dogmaz sarap diye tutturup, günde on yedi bin
dokuz yüz on üç inegin sütünü içen ve on altı bin adet cinin derisi ile üç gulyabaninin postundan
yapılma eldivenlere sahip olan Gargantua ile hiçbir benzerligi yoktur. Gargantua gibi, osurtmaca,
bilmece, düstü düstü, kaydırak, kudurtmaca, agızdan yellenmece ve merdiven oyunu oynamazlar.
Gargantua, çocuklugu boyunca pabuçlarına iser, gülmek için kendini gıdıklar, köpeklerin çanagından
yemek yer, oyuncak atına biner, kıçını bol tüylü kaz palazı ile siler, Notre Damme kilisesinin
kulelerinden asagıdakilerin üzerine iser,Yakın, "Çesme Sokagının Kayıp Çocukları: Kemalettin
Tugcu Romanları Ve Disiplin.", 195-196. But as Yakın continues, Tugcu’s children even did not have
any time to listen to tales. Ibid: 197. They had much ordinary work to do to earn their lives.
166
the end, he at least showed to all those middle-class child eyes that there were not
just children going to summer camps with their families, living in warm middle-class
apartment flats and posing as victorious Republican children in the photographs of
the 1930s and learning foreign languages in schools or swimming happily in the
shores of Bebek and Florya. But there could be others who seemed weaker, thinner,
had to work and give a hard life struggle to look after their families. If this positive
effect of his stories was rubbed out or not with his conclusion of many of the stories
that the dutiful, good-hearted children always got rich so that he was reproducing the
hegemony of wealth as the measure of success closing the doors to social
problematization of poverty, is still a debatable issue.
Dogan Kardes’s Shining Children and Their “Poor Friends”
Just in those years while Kemalettin Tugcu was writing about poor, homeless
and abandoned children in Çocuk Haftası, Turkey was witnessing significant
political transformations due to the political context after the Second World War.
The victory of “Western Liberal Democracies” against German, Italian and Japan
totalitarian regimes and the rising power of the United States accelerated the political
and economic liberalization in Turkey. The speech of smet nönü in 1 November
1945 is an important example showing the transformation of political discourse in
Turkey. As Feroz Ahmad reminds us, he accepted to make important political
changes in the one-party regime due to the changing conditions of the era and he
announced that the impelling needs of the country was paving the way for the
167
possibility of the establishment of an another political party by the guidance of the
atmosphere of liberty and democracy.263
The relations between the Republican alliance of military, bureaucracy, urban
intellectuals composed of journalists, teachers, doctors and merchants, businessmen
supported by the regime and the local landowners in the countryside in the
establishment of the Turkish nation-state had started to be broken because of the
merchants’, businessmen’s and local landowners’ discomfort with the rising political
and economic interference of the state especially in the War Years.264 The society
was already dissatisfied with the economic policies of the Republican People’s Party
in War Years because of the high inflation, general scarcity, the high burden of taxes
especially on the peasants to compensate for not being integrated to the Second
World War and rising socio-economic inequalities accelerated by the War years both
in the cities and the countryside. The context of the end of the War announcing the
victory of “Western Democracies” paved the way for an increasing discourse about
liberal democracy and the dissatisfaction of the group from the previous Republican
alliance caused the establishment of the Democrat Party in 7 January 1947 under the
leadership of Celal Bayar, Refik Koraltan, Fuat Köprülü and Adnan Menderes.
Dogan Kardes was born into such a context of an increasing discourse about
democracy and Turkey had already revelaed her side to be on the Western
alliance265. Dogan Kardes which was established in the name of Dogan Taskent,
263 Feroz Ahmad, Demokrasi Sürecinde Türkiye (1945-1980) (stanbul: Hil Yayınları, 1996): 22.
264 Ibid: 21.
265 Not just Dogan Kardes, but the previous nationalist, even Turkist publishers of the periodicals such
as Faruk Gürtunca reflected very well the choice of Turkey after the end of the Second World War. A
poem of Gürtunca about NATO named 4th of April, the NATO Day (source could not be found) shows
this very well: Dünyanın kuzeyinde/Avrupa devletleri/Barıs için elele/Konustular her biri./Genel
düsmana karsı,/Birlik ordu kurdular,/Böyle düsman önünde,/Kale gibi durdular./Kuzey Atlantik
Paktı,/Denildi bu birlige./Dünya kavusur elbet,/Bu birlikte dirlige./Kısaca (NATO) ya/Bu el ele
168
Kazım Taskent’s son in April 1945 by Vedat Nedim Tör266, seemed to represent
Turkey’s modern face that had turned her face completely to the West after the
isolation years of the Second World War. Dogan Kardes was published for long
years between 1945 and 1978 and again between 1988 and 1993.267 Turkey’s
increasing relationship with Western countries, especially the United States was well
reflected and praised in Dogan Kardes and Dogan Kardes seemed to undertake the
responsibilities of importing the Western liberal, secular and democratic codes to
Turkey through educating children with them in the second half of the 1940s.
The political attitudes that were tried to be instilled on children in Dogan
Kardes since its birth were defined by the ideals of democracy and one of the best
examples of it could be seen in a play written by Vedat Nedim Tör in 15 April 1946.
The name of the play was “We Are Choosing Our Mayor!”. It was about a group of
boys and girls in a classroom trying to choose the student who would be the mayor in
their 23 April Play by arranging an election. They make the elections due to the
principles of secret voting and open counting and they try to handle the process very
seriously. Both girls and boys could be candidates and they all made speeches in
vermeye/Dünya barısı için,/Saadete ermeye./Türkiye'de Nato'ya/Girmis olan devlettir./NATO'nun
düsündügü,/Evrensel saadettir.
266 Kazım Taskent was the founder of Construction and Credit Bank(Yapı ve Kredi Bankası) and he
was a significant initiator of the private sector. His son Dogan had died in a landslide in the Alps in
Switzerland and Vedat Nedim Tör had established Dogan Kardes and tried to reflect it as a brother to
children in the name of Dogan Taskent. Mine sögüt has written a significant book about the history of
Dogan Kardes and she has told all the process behind the establishment of Dogan Kardes. Sögüt says
that, Dogan Kardes was just that perfect Turkish child in the imagination of Kazım Taskent. Vedat
Nedim Tör had revived that perfect character of the Turkish child with pen and paper and had
managed to insert it in the untouched worlds of children” (Dogan Kardes, Kazım Taskent’in
hayalindeki kusursuz Türk Çocugunun ta kendisiydi. Vedat Nedim Tör, bu mükemmel çocuk
karakterini Dogan Kardes’le birlikte neredeyse ete kemige büründürür gibi kagıda kaleme
büründürmüs ve çocukların el degmemis dünyasına sokmayı basarmıstı), Mine Sögüt, Sevgili Dogan
Kardes (stanbul: YKY: 2003): 38. But in fact, Sögüt forgets something here: the world of children
was already touched since their birth by the adult ideologies. We have seen how their maps of
meaning were shaped by the narratives of children’s periodicals since the establishment of the
Republic. Their worlds have always been touched by the eras to which they were born. Their worlds
have never been untouched.
267 It was being published in Yeni Han in Beyoglu and was being sent only to the subscribers. The
price of 12 issues were 5 liras per 1 year and 3 liras per 6 months, Ibid: 37.
169
front of their friends before the process of the voting began. At the end a boy won the
elections and all the children were very happy that they did everything to democratic
rules.268
Dogan Kardes attributed itself significant roles for the political socialization
of Turkish children and this political socialization subjects of it were due to the
socio-economic and political context of the aftermath of the Second World War.
Apart from trying to instill the ideals of democracy to children, Dogan Kardes cared
a lot about teaching children saving money and consuming national products in those
hard socio-economic conditions:
Turkey is a country which has spread from underdeveloped technique
to developed technique. All our efforts are now for the speeding this
process up. We are establishing factories, banks, operating mines, we
are building railways, airports, ports, we are buying new ships, in short
we are working without stopping to raise more products, to speed up
our lives and to live a more developed life...All this work can only be
done with money. Money is saved by working and making a surplus.
The lazy nations have very few money just like lazy people. But
saving is not enough in itself. One must use the gained money
efficiently without squandering it and must deposit it in the banks and
run it there.269
Dogan Kardes represented the opening face of Turkey completely towards the
West and especially the United States after the end of the Second World War.270 But
268 Vedat Nedim Tör, "Belediye Baskanımızı Seçiyoruz!, 23 Nisan Piyesi," Dogan Kardes, no. 18 (15
April 1946): 15-18.
269 Türkiye, her alanda geri teknikten ileri teknige geçen bir memlekettir. Bütün çalısıp
çabalamalarımız, bu geçisi çabuklastırmak içindir. Fabrikalar kuruyoruz,madenler isletiyoruz,
bankalar açıyoruz, demir yollar dösüyoruz, uçak meydanları, limanlar yapıyoruz, yeni yeni vapurlar
satın alıyoruz, kısaca daha çok mal yetistirmek ve yasayısımızı daha çabuklastırmak, daha ileri bir
hayat sürmek için durmadan çalısıyoruz…Bütün bu isler para ile yapılır. Para, çalısmakla çogalır ve
arttırmakla birikir. Tenbel milletlerin, az çalısan milletlerin, tıpkı tenbel insanlar gibi, paraları azdır.
Çok para, çok çalısmakla kazanılır. Bu da yetmez, kazanılan paraları iyi kullanmak, yerinde
kullanmak, çarçur etmemek, sonra da artanı bankalara yatırıp isletmek lazımdır,Cemal Nadir,
"Arttırma Ve Yerli Mallar Haftası-Amcamız Konusuyor," Dogan Kardes, no. 9 (1 December 1945):3.
270 See "Türkiye Küçük Bir Amerika Olma Yolundadır," Dogan Kardes, no. 31 (1 November 1946):
13; "Amerika'da Çalısıp Hayatını Kazananları Herkes Sever Sayar," Dogan Kardes, no. 128 (24
March 1949): 3; "Türk Çocuklarının Yüksek Kabiliyetlerini Amerika'da Tanıtmaya Vesile
Oldugumuz çin Bahtiyarız," Dogan Kardes, no. 165 (24 November 1949): 3. As Mine Sögüt says,
Turkey was looking at the world by American glasses and this was also reflected in the discourse that
170
the nationalist sensitivity had not been sacrificed as seen in the above sentences
about national development. The same sensitivity was also seen in Dogan Kardes’s
effort to remind children the richness of national culture. For example, in 1945,
Cemal Nadir had written and pictured a fiction where the modernly dressed fictive
character; Uncle of Dogan Kardes was waiting for his guest Tarzan. “Fortunately the
war in Europe had ended and the airplanes had started to fly between the Old and
New Worlds” and so Tarzan could come as soon as possible271. When Tarzan came,
the modern Uncle complained to his guest Tarzan that, Turkish children knew Lorel-
Hardi, all the cowboys, Arsak Palabıyıkyan; but not Karagöz, Köroglu and
Nasreddin Hodja. Tarzan was saying to this modern man reflecting the modern
bureaucrat intellectuals of Turkey that, “It is the responsibility of you to illuminate
your children”. The modern Uncle decided to start the work from teaching children
Karagöz.272
But in fact the high proportion of most of the literary pieces translated from
Western sources showed that, Dogan Kardes wanted to teach children the Western
sources very much and wanted to educate them as shining beautiful minds donated
with the knowledge about Western civilization. This was a prerequisite to get
integrated to the West and Turkey in the contect of the aftermath of the Second
World War, had already determined her route to be with the West. Certainly there
was an effort to educate and advocate worldwide famous bright scienttists, historians,
composers, artists, musicians, painters, poets and the great focus on arts in the pages
of Dogan Kardes was related to the belief that enlightenment and development would
otherized the negros in Dogan Kardes in the 1950s when the white-black conflict was on the scene.
See Mine Sögüt, "Afrika'daki Zenci Kardesler," in Sevgili Dogan Kardes (stanbul: YKY Yayınları,
2003): 135-139.
271 Bereket versin, Avrupa Savası bittikten sonra, Eski Dünya ile Yeni Dünya arasında uçaklar vızır
vızır islemege basladı, Cemal Nadir, "Tarzan Türkiye'de," Dogan Kardes, no. 5 (1945): 16.
272 Ibid: 16-17.
171
first stem from science and arts. This is why the Western cultural resources had to be
well known by the tomorrow’s great artists.273 The achievements of dil Biret, Suna
Kan and Aysegül Sarıca abroad were always announced in the pages of Dogan
Kardes274 and there were a lot of art competitions arranged to support children
oriented towards arts.
In short, Dogan Kardes was speaking to those children who had the luxury
and time to follow these competitions by buying Dogan Kardes every week. They
were children whose parents wanted them to be bright and shine in their classrooms
as tidy, talented, hardworking, intelligent, active children in schools and supported
them to join to those competitions. It is at this point that Dogan Kardes continues the
hidden discourse of the 1930s in terms of the distinction between middle-class and
poor children despite many other transformations and changes contrary to the singleparty
aura of the 1930s. Although Dogan Kardes was the child of a changing
political climax, its audience was similar to the reader audience of the 1930s. The
mass to which Dogan Kardes was speaking to were the children of “urban, healthy,
cultured families having a specific life style and showing the features of nuclear
families”275. They were the children of middle-class and upper-middle class families
273 There were stories, tales from Western writers and writings that introduced the life story of famous
Western artists to children. See Münevver Alpar, "O Da Bir Çocuktu!," Dogan Kardes, no. 4 (1945):
31. There were also pieces about the most important Western cultural monuments like the Acropolis
in Athens, "Ah!Ne Güzel!," Dogan Kardes, no. 3 (1945): 26-27.
274 Mine Sögüt, "Bu Çocuklar Harika," in Sevgili Dogan Kardes (stanbul: YKY Yayınları, 2003): 74
84.
275 Kentli, saglıklı, kültürlü, belirli bir egitim ve yasam seviyesine sahip, genel olarak çekirdek aile
özellikleri gösteren ailelerin çocukları, Ayça (Demir) Gürdal, "Dogan Kardes, Vedat Nedim Tör Ve
"Kaka Bebekler"," Kebikeç, no. 19 (2005): 157. Gürdal summarizes the ideal Turkish child envisioned
by Dogan Kardes as such: “1-Every Turkish child must have a fit and healthy body, 2-Every Turkish
child must be interested in a branch of arts, 3-Every Turkish child must be healthy and clean, 4-Every
Turkish child must be hardworking and successful, 5-Every Turkish child must be in solidarity and
cooperation with his friends, 6-Every Turkish child must be good-hearted and intelligent”(1-Her Türk
Çocugu güzel vücutlu ve saglam olmalıdır, 2-Her Türk Çocugu sanatın bir dalı ile ugrasmalıdır, 3-
Her Türk çocugu saglıklı ve temiz olmalıdır, 4-Her Türk çocugu çalıskan ve basarılı olmalıdır, 5-Her
172
who were from then on children of the rising private initiative; merchants,
businessmen, bankers and free traders in addition to bureaucrats, living scheduled
lives in apartment flats having living and dining rooms, behaving due to good
manners and etiquette as their parents wanted them, having fixed playing and
studying times, studying hard, learning foreign languages, making jokes and gaining
the love of their parents by their sympathy and intelligence. This story was not new.
Dogan Kardes was born into a different political context of the end of the
Second World War when the previous Republican Alliance in the establishment of
the Turkish Republic had started to be broken and a new liberal atmosphere had
started to spread in the country. The single-party system had ended with the
establishment of the Democrat Party and the Democrat Party had caughty great
popularity among the masses.
But nothing was new in terms of poverty. The burden of the War years on
especially the lower classes and the peasants had been great. The high cost of living
during the war years had effected a high proportion of population badly and the most
encountered daily issue of the newspapers during the war was the high cost of
living.276
This condition had caused the unemployment of many people and the
empoverishment of many families. The poor child in Kemalettin Tugcu’s stories was
not just a fiction; the children having to work to look after their families was a reality
which had been more visible with the hard price of the Second World War for many
families in the city and in the countryside.
Türk çocugu dayanısmacı ve isbirligi içinde olmalıdır, 6-Her Türk Çocugu iyi ve akıllı olmalıdır),
Ibid: 163-173.
276 See "Hayat Pahalılıgile Mücadele çin Ana Kararlar Lazım; Bilhassa Degismez Gelirli Yurddasları
Istıraba Sürükliyen Bu Buhran Ancak yi Düsünülmüs, Çabuk Tatbik Edilen Açık Ve Etraflı Devlet
Kararlarile Önlenebilir.," Cumhuriyet, 1 October 1942: 1; "Hayat Pahalılıgı Karsısında Çareler,"
Cumhuriyet, 4 October 1942: 1.
173
Dogan Kardes, which wanted to educate bright, good-hearted, hardworking
children, attributed itself the responsibility of reminding the virtues of “lending a
helping hand to poor” to those middle-class children. In fact, Dogan Kardes was so
oriented towards middle-class children as its readers that, there were not so many
pieces about poor children in its issues like Çocuk Haftası.. But just like the other
periodicals of the period, Dogan Kardes internalized the notion of charity and
defined poverty and charity on the same plane. In one of the issues in 1949, Dogan
Kardes published a letter from a poor child. The child was offering his thanks to a
rich man who did not want to declare his name. This rich man had subscribed 10
poor children to Dogan Kardes and the boy writing the letter was saying that he was
one of them. He was saying that, previously he could not buy Dogan Kardes and was
always longing for readimg it when he saw his friends with Dogan kardes in their
hands. From then on, he could read all those pieces of entertainment, games, science
pages and look at the interesting photographs and he felt himself so indebted to this
rich man.277
As we see, Dogan Kardes wanted from its readers to “think of their poor
friends”. Those “poor friends” were certainly not among those mass of reader
children, they were somewhere outside. They could only read the issues of Dogan
Kardes if a rich man subscribed them to the periodical. Otherwise, they would just be
jealous of their friends whose parents could buy them the periodical every time.
Dogan Kardes wanted from its readers to be ideal Turkish children in modern Turkey
and behave due to the parameters that they would be the future citizens of this
modern Turkey. They had to lend a helping hand to the poor as a good and ideal
Turkish child had to do.
277 "Fakir Arkadaslarınızı Düsünün!," Dogan Kardes, no. 122 (27 January 1949): 3.
174
The 1940s were the years when poverty and the boundary between middleclass
Republican families and poor families became more visible. The political
discourse after 1945 was shaped around “the transition of Turkey to multi-party and
democracy period”. Dogan Kardes reflected the political transformation of Turkey
turning her face to parameters of “Western Liberal Democracies and the United
States”. But although the political discourse was new, the social life continued
without much change in terms of poverty. There were more “poor friends” after the
war. And in the pages of Dogan Kardes, those “poor friends” were only objects of
charity for the middle-class eyes of reader children who were educated to be bright
children at home and at school for the sake of the country. The ideal Turkish child
who had to be healthy, clean, hardworking, cooperative, intelligent, scheduled,
obedient, active and social had to be aware that, there were “poor friends” outside.
But those “poor friends” did not take much place in the pages of Dogan
Kardes. The support of the education of bright middle-class children like Dogan
Taskent was the real focus of it.
***
The years from the end of the 1930s towards the 1940s show us how poverty
and poor children became the subject-issue of many children’s periodicals due to the
hard socio-economic conditions accelerated with the Second World War. The
increasing proportion of those writings about the stories of poverty and poor,
homeless children of especially Kemalettin Tugcu’s were taking place together with
pieces equating the child with the nationalist project and Republican ideals of
progress in the pages of the periodicals.
175
The writings in the periodicals targeted a particular sterile middle-class child
of the Republican nuclear family going to summer camps and living with schedules
and due to a particular etiquette as we have seen in the first part of this chapter. But
the poor child figures that were more visible since the end of the 1930s were
certainly the objects of those middle-class children reading them. To put it more
precise, those children of middle-class Republican families were reading the stories
of poor, homeless children in their homes and were being warned about either
keeping away from those street children whose poverty was a result of their laziness
or bad morals or vice versa they were being warned about lending a helping hand to
that “poor” and getting a lesson from those poor but morally upright and
hardworking children as seen in Kemalettin Tugcu’s stories. In both ways, the poor
children were the objects of the subject middle-class child readers. The writers and
the publishers knew with whom they were establishing a dialogue and they could
only be children whose parents bought them those periodicals every week and did
not find it a luxury.
176
CHAPTER IV
CONCLUSION
In 1989, a story about a father and his son was published in Dogan Kardes.
The story was written from the mouth of the son. His father had taken him to the
meeting of the Generation of 68’s. The son gets really bored there. But the main
interesting point comes with the comments of the son: “Inevitably I got there with
my dad. What a boring day it was! All of them think that they are still living the 20
years ago.”
These words of the son in 1989 reflect very well the transformations in the
world and the society through the image of the child. The image of the child used
here gives the message that it was a new era. The dialogues of the men in the
Generation of 68’s were perceived just as old mutters and murmurs belonging to a
177
completely different time and aura which can just sound as so “old” and “boring” to
a child born in the beginning of the 1980s. The world had already started to change,
communism had scattered, the culture of liberal economy had started to expand in
great density. The soul and the images of 1968 were left behind.
The political polarization in Turkey in 1960s and 1970s and the dramatic
experience of a generation were left behind in memories after the 1980 coup. Turkey
had started to change due to the main route of the world in the aura of globalization
which would get a much sharper pace and breaking in the 1990s. A little fictive boy
was announcing it in Dogan Kardes in 1989 with a great confidence: “All of them
think that they are still living the 20 years ago.”
The perception of the son in the above narrative regarding the recent past of
his country is an evidence of the close relationship between the memory and the
common-sense of the society and its children in a particular context. This once more
reminds us that, childhood is not just a biological existence. It is not just a biological
or social category ;it is a flexible space of identity which is both shaped by and in
turn shapes the political images existing in a specific socio-historical context. It is an
area of memory where competing political projections in the experienced sociohistorical
context are portrayed, visualized and internalized in the simplest but also
most detailed form. Children in this sense, stand just at the middle of politics just as
everyone in the society. The intensity of the value attributed to them is sometimes
higher, sometimes lower. They attribute and are attributed meanings and burdens due
to the hegemonic perceptions of their times. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the
children in addition to young people were the actors through whom the neo-liberal
culture sent its messages and valued them as customers in the consumption culture.
The son in the above narrative voices the reality of his time by a simple sentence
178
about his boredom because of the dialogues of his father’s friends. But in fact, there
is much more than the boredom the child felt in that sentence. That simple sentence
shines as the mark of change in the zeit-geist and in the aura of the 1990s Turkey.
Looking at earlier times, in the 1930s and early 1940s Turkey, the Republican
ideology was imagined at most through children attributing them great roles and
burdens. Children were rendered as the most valuable metaphors of the newly born
nation-state as they were the symbols of birth, progress and a new start. In this sociohistorical
and political context of nation-state formation, the density of the value
attributed to children was much higher as they symbolized the future of the Republic
whose identity had to be shaped at the present.
This study departed from the faith in the significance of children as real
political actors in the society and the belief in the inevitable link between the
competing political projections experienced in the specific social reality and the
images in the memories of children about their society in that specific context. By
this, it aimed to shed light on the ways through which the mainstream images of the
Republic targeting children, constituted a particular childhood(s) intertwined with
terms of gender and class in 1930s and 1940s Turkey and tried to wander in the
imagination of 1930s and 1940s children. My main aim was to show at least some of
the mainstream channels and images through which the Republic’s children were
categorized, encountered the society and were made to be socialized politically. But
unfortunately because of the lack of resources, this was done more by the analysis of
the discourse of Republican adults rather than the real voice of the child which is a
deficit in most of the studies about childhood.
I chose a thematic approach rather than a chronological one as my main focus
was on the continuities of the Republican images through 1930s and early 1940s
179
targeting the construction of a particular generation. But in my analysis of themes
and images, I paid attention to the distinction between the years 1930-39 in terms of
the context of the single-party regime and etatism, 1939-45 in terms of the Second
World War and poverty as its effect portrayed more in the narratives rather than the
Republican and nationalist myths of the 1930s and aftermath of 1945 in terms of the
end of the Second World War and the transformations in the Turkish political arena.
My main tools have been children’s periodicals which are chosen at most by their
feature of enclosing the brightest clues about the relationship of the Republic and its
children. Because as the periodicals directly called out to children, the most complex
debates of the Republic had to be voiced in the simplest form with visualization in
their pages to attract the imagination of a child. It is at that point that, the need to use
a simple and visual discourse for children, makes the issue a caricaturized and
simplified shadow of its origin in the discourse of the adults. By this, the hidden
dilemmas come out to the surface more easily as the simple language of children’s
periodicals does not allow to rotate words. The content in these periodicals is seen as
bright as a child’s mind can internalize.
Departing from these points and looking at six mainstream children’s
periodicals published between the years mentioned in the first chapter (Çocuk
Sesi/1928-1939 owned by Faruk Gürtunca; Cumhuriyet Çocugu/1938-1939,
Yavrutürk/1936-1942 and Çocuk Haftası/1943-1949 owned by Tahsin Demiray;
Çocuk/1939-1940 owned by Fuad Umay under the auspices of the Children’s
Protection Society and Dogan Kardes/1945-1949 owned by Vedat Nedim Tör under
the auspices of the Yapı Kredi Bank), some results regarding the relationship of the
Republic and its children were found. I gathered these results in two levels of
analysis: The second chapter was limited to the political discourse arena of the
180
periodicals related to projections of nation-building, modernization, progress and
secularism which attributed children great public roles and wanted to socialize them
politically as future adults and citizens in the context of the single-party power in
1930s.
But the third and fourth chapters focused more on the aura of the daily lives
of children at home. In this respect, I found that the qualification of the burden and
duties attributed to all children as the children of the nation in political discourse
changed and “the children of the nation” were divided into two flexible groups
between the lines: the projection of an idealized, modern nuclear family intertwined
with a flexible middle-class identity and envisioned the inclusion of a particular
middle-class childhood in the heart of the Republican vision of the country. But on
the other hand, compared to middle-class children, a “poor” and “homeless”
childhood emphasized more due to the rising poverty in the society by the onset of
the Second World War in 1939 till 1945, was otherized and defined, paradoxically
either as an object of pity, mercy and appreciation by its good qualities of honour and
good morals despite poverty; or as an object of exclusion by a literature of
vagabondage, laziness and immorality attributed to that condition of “poor”
childhood. Poverty and poor children in this sense were never perceived as issues of
social conflict. The social conflicts stemming from poverty in this respect in social
reality were identified on just a moral plane which excluded any political and socioeconomical
approach to the issue in the periodicals.
Looking at the first level of political discourses of 1930s, we see that the
founders of the Republic envisioned a metaphorical relationship between the child
and the nation. This was very much reflected in Gürtunca’s and Demiray’s
periodicals which were the most popular ones of their time published after the
181
adoption of the Latin Alphabet. These were generally in circulation in big cities and
so were calling out to an urban audience of children. The envisioned equation of the
child and the nation paved the way for great burdens and responsibilities attributed to
children who had to be educated with the hegemonic values of the Turkish nationstate
based on the ideals of lineer progress, secularism, disjunction from the Ottoman
past as seen from many narratives and stories in the periodicals. For this, the child
immediately had to reach at maturity, get rid of childish behaviours and coyness and
get ready for carrying the Turkish Republic on his shoulders as a strong,
hardworking, morally upright, healthy, active and social “future citizen”. The main
tools of political socialization were the narratives appreciating the single-party and
its achievements in terms of carrying the country to the destination of progress and
development.
The children’s periodicals were claiming that they were calling out to all
children of the country. But in fact, we have seen that their audience was mostly
children of urban middle-class families both in stabul and in other cities in Anatolia.
The publishers and writers belonging to the state intelligentsia by most of their
professions as teachers, were establishing a dialogue only with children of those
nuclear middle-class families, living in harmony in modern houses where every
member of the family had definite roles. The readers of the periodicals were
generally children of bureaucrats, civil servants, soldiers, teachers or bankers,
working under the auspices of the state and the expectations of the Republican
Regime and their parents from them were in harmony with the envisioned organic
solidarity of the nation.
The father was visualized generally as a modern figure of outright discipline
at home while the mother was a modern housewife “guiding her children from
182
behind” with great sacrifice and compassion. The children in this warm nuclear home
were portrayed as innocent, hardworking and tidy figures obedient to their parents.
The order of the house for the sake of the nation was emdedded in the proper
functioning of each member’s roles in the house.
The daily status-quo of the idealized Republican family carried in itself also
the hegemonic middle-class codes envisioning a particular life-style. One of the
marks of this situation was the definition of etiquette and good manners portraying
aristocratic sensitivities. But in fact these rules envisioned the child as a weak,
passive and silent figure who was always expected not to talk much. But the dilemma
was that, these children of middle-class families were portrayed also as so active,
intelligent children good at making quick replies with their cunning in most of the
narratives and caricatures published as the cover pages. On the one hand passivity
was envisioned, on the other hand activity and performance were appreciated.
The life-styles of these children was also made evident in their perception of
holiday where most of them went or were sent by their parents to summer camps
near the sea where they lived a complete scheduled life. They swimmed, slept, read
their books, learned foreign languages; in fact had the luxury to do all these. The
ones who did not go to summer camps, generally wrote about going to sea in their
summer houses near the shores. This once more declared the specific class codes of
the standard Republican family.
The audience of the periodicals were portrayed as these children of middleclass
families going to summer camps and living with a particular life-style in
apartment flats and due to a particular definition of etiquette and good manners. But
the poor child figures that were more emphasized since the end of the 1930s and
were intensified in the Second World War Conditions, were just portrayed as the
183
reading materials of those middle-class children. Those children of middle-class
Republican families were reading the stories of poor, homeless children in their
warm middle-class homes and were being warned about either keeping away from
those street children whose poverty was a result of their laziness or bad morals or
vice versa they were being warned about lending a helping hand to that “poor” and
getting a lesson from those poor but morally upright and hardworking children as
seen in Kemalettin Tugcu’s stories. In both ways of the depiction of “poor” children
as summarized above, the “poor children” were generally just images being read
about by middle-class child readers. They were not the audience of these periodicals.
The writers and the publishers were not trying to establish a dialogue with them. The
writers and the publishers were just trying to tell narratives about those “poor”
children or “poor” friends as in the discourse of Dogan Kardes to their middle-class
child audience.
But, Tugcu’s stories in a way made poverty more visible and instilled mercy
onto children in the 1940s. His value came from his distinction to show those
middle-class readers intensely that there could be other lives of children outside who
had to work since their childhood and earn the daily bread of their families. But on
the other hand, he romanticized poverty. Poverty in this sense was portrayed as an
issue emptied from its socio-economical and political meaning and just donated with
moral meanings.
But there is one very significant thing that combine both the reader middleclass
children and the poor, homeless children on the same plane: They are both
children who are attributed a great value not as an essential artefact that they are
children, but because they are the metaphors meaning a lot of significant things to the
society. They generally are not pictured as having any essential value in the
184
periodicals. They are shown as valuable because they are the “future generations”,
“future citizens”, “metaphors of progress”, “metaphors of disjunction with the past”
as seen in the middle-class child readers.
Or as seen in the depiction of “poor” and “homeless” children, they are
valuable because they “give a hard life-struggle by working in their childhood and
earning the bread of their families.” The child is praised with that life-struggle but in
fact he is just a child. A working child does not sound as something to be
problematized but it sounds as so natural. For example, in Kemalettin Tugcu’s The
Bazaar of Children, the reader is expected to praise Ayse because of the hard work
she managed for her family throughout the story. But she did not have to do all those
things in fact. But if she did not do them, she would not be praised by the readers by
her being “such a dutiful child.”
There is so much burden attributed on the children of the Republic which
becomes more visible especially with the depiction of poor, homeless children.
Those poor children have to give such a hard struggle to gain the love and mercy of
the readers. As we see in some of the cover pages of the periodicals including
caricatures, there were smiling middle-class children pictured as good at making
quick replies to their parents, making jokes to them by which the readers were
expected to praise their intelligence and cunning. These children were in fact the
opposite of silent, weak, thin poor children. The cute narrative about the jokes that
middle-class faces made to their parents in the pictures, turn out to be a narrative that
praises silent, thin, weak, poor children like Ayse. Ayse does not make any jokes to
her parents because she has to earn the bread of her family and it is not natural for
her to behave like that. She is the one praised with her silence and respect while the
middle-class children are the ones to whose cunning jokes the adults were laughing.
185
But on the other hand we should again remember the other dilemma of the Republic
that, while the adults were laughing at the cunning jokes of those middle-class
children, they at the same time wanted to silence them and instill on them a passivity
by definition of good morals and etiquette as we have seen in the previous pages.
This means, although the middle-class children and the poor, homeless
children were both valued due to the societal perceptions of nationalism, modernity
and charity but not due to any essential value stemming from their being just as
“children”; the burden on the poor people and children in the narratives were much
heavier. They had to sacrifice a lot from their childhood. They had to forget their
childhood and earn the bread of their families like adults. The middle-class children
in the narratives at least continued to stay as a child without having to undertake the
responsibilities of earning the daily bread of the family.
Throughout this study, it was aimed to show how the Republic portrayed its
children and the values attributed to them in the context of the 1930s and early
1940s. I departed from the belief in the inevitable link between the maps of meaning
of children in a particular socio-historical context and the mainstream routes of that
society and tried to imagine the ways through which the Republic imagined its
children through children’s periodicals. I arrived at the conclusion that, the
Republican intelligentsia internalized the discourse of “all children of the nation”
while the portrayal of children in the narratives paved the way to differentiating two
flexible groups of children: The middle-class child readers and their “poor”
counterparts being read about. The real socio-economical conflicts in the social
reality of Second World War conditions that had intensified poverty, were reflected
in the periodicals as just moral questions.
186
The distinction between middle-class and poor children was defined on such
a moral plane where the child was tried to be attracted to the belief that, the good
would always win and get rich in the end. But in a way, success was perceived only
to be gained by gaining real wealth. Wealth was perceived as the measure of success
and the final destination; the only way to get rid of misery and poverty. It is this
moment that brought the 1950s to the scene when urbanization and migration
brought with them new success stories of little children in the context of a
transforming Turkey. There were from then on real stories more about “today’s
“poor” children but tomorrow’s merchants and businessmen” in the 1950s Turkey.
In this study, the analysis of the images and themes of the Republican
discourse in children’s periodicals made me arrive at some points which makes it
easier for me now to imagine and guess at least what was in a child’s mind regarding
his/her society in the socio-historical context of the 1930s and early 1940s. But a
discourse analysis is never enough in terms of highlighting that phenomena. A huge
arena is waiting for researchers in terms of using the possibilities of the intertwined
cross-cultural arenas of psychology, social and cultural history and shed light more
on the children’s maps of meanings within their specific socio-historical and political
contexts.
187
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Periodicals
Çocuk, 1939-1940.
Çocuk Haftası, 1943-1949.
Çocuk Sesi, 1928-1939.
Cumhuriyet Çocugu, 1938-1939.
Dogan Kardes, 1945-1949.
Yavrutürk, 1936-1942.