Peyami Safa
Peyami Safa (born April 2, 1899 in Istanbul , † June 15, 1961 ibid), pseudonym Server Bedi , was a Turkish writer .
Live and act
His father, the well-known writer Ismail Safa , lived with the family in Sivas . He died when Peyami Safa was two years old. Then Safa moved to Istanbul with his mother . Due to a severe bone disease, Safa narrowly escaped an arm amputation at the age of eight and had to drop out of school at that age.
Safa started working as a printer when he was 13. He published his first short story at the age of 14. In 1912 he got a job at the Turkish Ministry of Post and was able to catch up on his schooling. From 1914 to 1918 he worked as a teacher and published texts in the Istanbul newspaper Yirminci Asır .
Gradually he was able to gain a foothold as a man of letters. He published more in newspapers like Cumhuriyet and Son Posta and various magazines and wrote besides novels , short stories , essays , n and novellas . Under the pseudonym Server Bedi he published detective novels , with which he financed his living.
In the early 1930s he was the features editor of the daily Cumhuriyet . In 1941 he left after the publisher had publicly distanced himself from the fact that Safa, as editor , had printed a poem by Nâzım Hikmet, who was imprisoned at the time . Safa had been friends with Hikmet since they were together in the 1920s at the cultural magazine Resimli Ay , published by Zekeriya Sertel ; He dedicated the first edition of his 1930 novel Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu (German title: “Room 9 for External Diseases”) to Hikmet.
In the course of his life, Safa changed his ideological and political convictions several times. In recent years he had socialist and Kemalist views from the 1930s, he was inspired by Ahmet Ağaoğlus symbiosis of liberalism and pan-Turkism inspired. Most recently, he represented conservative views with nationalist and Islamic influences.
After leaving Cumhuriyet , Safa began to write for the daily Ulus and the nationalist magazine Çınaraltı and the Islamist magazine Büyük Doğu (“Great East”) published by Necip Fazıl Kısakürek . In an ideological sense, he turned from materialism to mysticism .
In 1944 Safa's name was on a list of 47 names drawn up in preparation for the Racism-Turanism Trial ; however, he was not one of the 27 accused.
In 1950, Safa wrote vehemently in Ulus against the campaign for the release of his former friend Hikmet. This was not only for political reasons, because Safa was meanwhile a staunch anti-communist , but was also the result of a personal offense because Hikmet had polemicized against him as a “salon intellectual” in an article in the newspaper Tan that appeared under a pseudonym .
In the early 1950s he left Ulus and founded the cultural magazine Türk Düşüncesi ("Turkish Thought"). In 1954, at the invitation of Ali Naci Karacan , he began to write columns for Milliyet , where he repeatedly argued publicly in a polemical manner with Aziz Nesin , who wrote for the same paper . In 1959 he moved to the conservative newspaper Tercüman , for which he wrote until his death.
The polemic with Azis Nesin was not the first in Safa's journalistic life; in earlier times he was involved in public polemics with authors such as Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Ahmet Hâşim or Celal Nuri İleri.
Literary work
Central themes of his work are the contrast between Orient and Occident and the question of Turkey's role between these two poles. In numerous essays of his later days, Safa argued against the compulsive westernization of Turkey: he saw in Kemalism the danger that if the rapprochement with the West were too close, moral weakness would find its way into Turkish society.
In his first novel, Sözde Kızlar (“The Pseudo Girls”), he depicts this conflict by comparing women in different Turkish areas. Safa depicts the Anatolian women as virtuous and chaste, while he depicts women from Istanbul as immoral people who love their love have lost to the nation and religion. Similar in his novel Fatih-Harbiye (German title: “Between East and West”) , published in 1931 : In it, Safa compares two opposing districts of Istanbul: the conservative Fatih and the more western-oriented Harbiye. The two main male characters who court the same woman come from these opposing worlds and are socialized differently. The protagonist is torn between the two worlds.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calls Safa a “great Turkish novelist”, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes about him: “Peyami Safa, a conservative novelist and publicist, did not deny the high values of Western culture, but claimed that this culture had been around since the middle of 19th century was in a serious intellectual crisis and could no longer act as a role model. "
Works
In addition to countless articles for newspapers and magazines, Safa's extraordinarily productive work includes 13 novels, six volumes of short stories, a drama and 15 non-fiction books in the series “Was ist ...?” Or “Who is ...?”. His newspaper articles appeared in 18 books, some of which were published posthumously. There are also published under the pseudonym server Bedi trivial literary 40 novels and 63 short stories.
Peyami Safa has published in German:
- Room 9 for external diseases - Gummersbach: Florestan 1947
- Between East and West - Leipzig: Payne 1943
- Bogus girl
literature
Beşir Ayvazoğlu: Peyami Safa , in: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (ed.): TDV İslam Ansiklopedisi , Vol. 35, Istanbul 2008, pp. 437-440, ISBN 975-389-457-0
Web links
- Literature by and about Peyami Safa in the catalog of the German National Library
- www.turkishculture.org - biography and bibliography (English)
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Safa, peyami |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bedi, server (pseudonym) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Turkish writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 2, 1899 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Istanbul |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 15, 1961 |
| Place of death | Istanbul |