Istanbul is remaking itself at a fast pace... while living on the verge of political catastrophe.
A few years back I sat in the office of a prominent architect and looked over his plans for a suburb of the growing city of Istanbul. He had a lovely book of images showing a large development. Clearly Istanbul was a happening place.
Claire Berlinski offers This Insightful Analysis [click to read] of modern Istanbul, drawing disturbing parallels with Berlin during the Weimar era.
"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." -- Claire Berlinski
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