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BEIRUT: Hans-Lukas Kieser’s interest in Turkey began in the 1980s when he studied history in Zurich. On Sept. 12, 1980, Turkey experienced its third coup, but “nobody could explain to me the whole background,” Kieser said. At the end of the 1980s, he finally decided to specialize in the history of the Near East. Sensing a lack of intellectual material, Kieser started to write the books he had always wanted to read.
Despite his preference for what he refers to as the periphery, ie regional minorities such as the Kurds, Alevis and Armenians, he believed he had a duty to explore the center.
He has published many books, including “World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the American Genocide.” However, this brilliant portrait of Talaat Pasha is in a league of its own.
For a start, it is the first biography available in English about this Ottoman politician largely unheard of outside Turkey.
Also known as the Turkish Bismarck, Talaat Pasha (1874-1921) was the last powerful leader of the Ottoman Empire. As the eminence grise behind the Armenian genocide, he viewed the Armenians who pursued their dream of freedom as “a perpetual element of subversion for the Sublime State,” and thus they lost their right to exist.
This detailed, well-researched account of his life re-establishes Talaat Pasha as a key figure during the first decades of the 20th century. A self-made man who came from a lower middle-class family in Edirne, Talaat Pasha not only became the first figure of the Ottoman Empire but is also the father of modern Turkey.
In this groundbreaking biography, Kieser acknowledges that “Kemal Ataturk largely endorsed Talaat as his predecessor” and reiterates that “the Republic of Turkey was largely founded on Talaat’s groundwork and Gokalp’s ideas.”
Writing from the perspective of Istanbul, the author has taken a novel approach to the last Ottoman decade, thus placing this historic period and its actors “more firmly in the center, instead of the periphery, of a history of larger Europe.”