Claire Berlinski writes an intruiging piece in City Journal on the phenomenon of "Weimar City." I am currently haunting Berlin, one of the more famous examples, and the namesake, of the term. Her main idea:

World War I destroyed both Imperial Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The remnants of both entities succeeded in imposing alien new social orders on themselves, fragile experiments in democracy. The Turkish Republic has lasted far longer than the Weimar Republic, but the stories do not differ in the fundamentals; they have merely been telescoped or expanded by contingent events.

Berlinski illustrates wonderfully the overlapping revolutions convulsing Turkey--the incomplete Kamelist and the surging Islamist--as well as the unsettling paranoia concerning the Ergenekon terrorist cell.

The accused say that Ergenekon is fictitious. “This is 100 percent political,” one defendant’s lawyer said. “It has all been cooked up by the government and by the imperialist powers, the CIA, Mossad, and the Jewish lobby and the European Union, to eliminate Turkish nationalism.” The only belief that unites this fractured society is that the Jews are somehow to blame. Whether Ergenekon is real or Erdoǧan’s answer to the Reichstag fire, I cannot say; it is surely true that many have been arrested and that many more are terrified.

As for my prolonged silence, I confess that I lost my laptop upon entering Berlin. Tonight I will try for a proper post on this hostel's computer.
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