Belonging and genocide: Hitler's community, 1918–1945

two decades. An educational system was devised to propagate a monocultural view of identity. People’s Houses and Rooms were created in towns and villages across eastern Turkey to spread and monitor this monoculture. Radio, literature, history writing, and music were marshaled, and educational and economic incentives and disincentives were used to cement this identity. The Surname Law and the renaming of villages, towns, and the natural landscape. were used for similar purposes. Some of these techniques, such as the boarding school system, resembled those employed against native populations in North America and Australia. Internal colonization was pursued by the Kemalist regime and its successors, with tragic effects. When I first encountered Üngör’s The making of modern Turkey, I heard echoes of a similarly titled work, The emergence of modern Turkey, by the renowned Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis. Lewis’s book is broader in scope, but if one truly desires a deep understanding of modern Turkey, not compromised in important respects by mythic Republican historiography, then Üngör’s book should be favored over Lewis’s. I cannot recommend it more highly.