Weimar Istanbul by Claire Berlinski, City Journal Autumn 2010
The City was proud: it was the new vanguard, the greatest metropolis in the world! It was ashamed: look at what had been lost, how ugly it had become! The City “delighted most, terrified some, but left no one indifferent, and it induced, by its vitality, a certain inclination to exaggerate what one saw.” So Peter Gay described Weimar Berlin.
But his descriptions, as do all of these, might have been written about the Istanbul in which I live. There is a spookiness to living in a city at the epicenter of an impending political catastrophe, a mood of dread but also of astonishing vitality—economic, creative, artistic. It is a distinctive mood and, to anyone acquainted with history, a familiar mood.
There is, it seems, such a phenomenon as a Weimar City.
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Ve’ll come and behead you, We’ll come. . .
Interesting article; but Berlinski has clearly decided to live dangerously. Not that the risk is going to stop me from getting to Istanbul to see Sancta Sophia and other stuff before Turkey enters its dark years or decades.