Turkey’s 12 September coup: From trauma to nostalgia

Confrontation/assimilation of difficult pasts and dealing with unresolved trauma

Nostalgia functions as a way of confronting and assimilating problematic pasts. Despite the hard facts introduced by past trauma, nostalgia offers a “homey and familiar structure” while confronting the problematic pasts (Horowitz, 2010: 45). In the context of intergenerational trauma, nostalgia serves as a crucial means for one generation to confront, understand, and overcome the heavy experiences of previous generations. Instead of viewing nostalgia as a “flawed design of the past,” we must comprehend why the past is recalled within such a framework. Horowitz (2010: 47) suggests considering what her students on the Holocaust have to say about the relationship between the past and the present, rather than dismissing their nostalgic thoughts and feelings as false. Nostalgia serves as “a means of affirming survival of past trauma” (Delisle, 2006: 394) and as a vital method for coping with trauma that extends into the present. This highlights the specific significance of nostalgia in bridging the past and the present. In encounters with the past, nostalgia can have a “positive impact” or act as a means to “rehabilitation for forgotten losses” (Agostinho et al., 2012: 3).

The impact of traumatic experiences and losses should not be seen as limited; they have ongoing effects that influence current perceptions. Nostalgic sentiments present “the past as a recurrent trauma that should be dealt with in the present” (Sremac and Van Liere, 2024: 13–14), allowing for a new understanding of the past, which may have been difficult to represent due to its traumatic nature. This approach makes it possible to acknowledge the trauma and consider its lasting impact on the present. The 12 September coup represents an unresolved trauma that spans generations. It was clearly “the deepest caesura in the contemporary history of the left in Turkey,” and “there has been almost no left in public during the first half of the 1980s” (Pekesen, 2020: 478). The traumatic feature of the event, coupled with Turkish society’s bystanding/supportive attitude toward the coup and its implementors, hindered publicly speaking on the coup experience. It has been “a turning point”; “followed by a suppression phase” which is capable of creating an “amnesia” (Rousso, 1990: 582 cited in Traverso, 2019: 49). However, this suppression was followed by a will to remember in subsequent generations and the very relation between the former suppression and later emerging will to remember enables one generation’s trauma to turn into nostalgia in subsequent generations. Nostalgia of young left-wingers is a means to approach the traumatic past. The coup’s destruction of sites of memory, its censorship preventing the representation of the historical truth, the self-censorship, the social internalization of this suppression, the depoliticization and the silence and lacunae had repercussions for subsequent generations. However, contrary to what is expected, these are reflected in a persistent effort by left-wingers of subsequent generations to remember and acknowledge the past and even to fetishize the past through nostalgic yearning.

Identity building and fostering group cohesion

Nostalgia in the face of past trauma also has implications for identity building/maintaining and group cohesion. Trauma threatens identity and the intergenerational bonds between the identity groups. Nostalgia has the potential ability to provide “rootedness and identity” (Horowitz, 2010: 52) by enabling “yearning for a different time that is shared among social groups and reinforces the social cohesion of groups” as well as contributing to the group solidarity (Sremac and Van Liere, 2024: 14–16). Here, we can also recall Davis’ (1979) seminal attempt at sociologizing nostalgia by examining its relationship with individual/collective identities. Nostalgia functions in adapting to the threatening conditions of the present, particularly in the context of identity. Thus, in post-conflict societies, trauma and nostalgia become intermingled and “collective traumas and nostalgic memories can be invoked to reinforce” the identity of groups (Sremac and Van Liere, 2024: 26). Regarding left-wing identity, the 12 September coup was an indisputable and absolute defeat. “The dissolution of left-wing politics and the society” (Toker, 2005: 53), a very deep feeling of impotence that resulted in a left-wing cynicism (Bora, 2011: 46) and “a state of not being capable anymore” (Laçiner, 2005: 16) were arguments made by left-wing intellectuals and clearly confirmed this defeat. Kaptanoğlu (2005: 75) epitomizes it as such: the left wing in Turkey who was “left in the middle with the big hole in its soul because of the loss of its people, for which it did everything to be its everything” never came to terms with the coup and never mourned for its loss (p. 78). The 12 September experience was inherited by subsequent generations without a genuine and rational signification by the former generations and this significantly reinforced the sense of loss and defeat. This, in turn, became the main component of rupture, or a radical break, in the left wing’s biography in Turkey, and loss became “its own form of cultural identity” (Whitehead, 2010: 221), contributing a great deal in shaping Turkish left-wing identity. As nostalgic subjects, the subsequent generation of left-wingers turned to the past “to find/construct sources of identity, agency, or community that are felt to be lacking, blocked, subverted, or threatened in the presence” (Tannock, 1995: 454). Thus, the nostalgia of subsequent generations is an effort to pursue a political identity inherited from older generations and a means of group cohesion in the center of which stands a wounded/threatened identity.

Connecting with previous generations and seeking an intergenerational bond

Identity claims play a crucial role in connecting generations by upholding tradition and continuity. The combination of nostalgia and trauma is significant in terms of intergenerational bonds. The process of facing loss and mourning succeeds traumatic experiences, forming a continuous intergenerational effort to create a community based on fundamental “values of justice” (Agostinho et al., 2012: 6). Mourning is a shared act that has an enduring and influential impact on individual and collective life stories (Butler, 2005: 37). Nostalgia can be seen as a form of collective mourning as “a nostalgic iconizing of the past may unite people in vicarious mourning” (Sremac and Van Liere, 2024: 14). Vicarious mourning is the legacy passed down to generations who have not experienced the traumatic event, wherein nostalgic longing offers “ the idea of being the cultural and political heirs of those who perished” (Sremac and Van Liere, 2024: 23). Consequently, the nostalgia of one generation facilitates mourning as the focal point of an intergenerational bond with the traumatized generation. Combined with the difficulty of discussing the traumatic experience, younger generations may latch onto these sentiments (O’Donohoe, 2024: 93) and even formulate political visions through nostalgia.

One of the objectives behind the effort to annihilate the left-wing movement by the coup was to sever the bonds between succeeding generations of left-wingers and preclude a possible resurrection. A testimony from a dialogue between a detainee and a torturer gives an idea of the coup’s intentions: While torturing a detainee, the military officer is claimed to have said: “We will create a generation that will not even know you” (cited in Mavioğlu, 2006b: 173). However, “traces of a ‘traumatic’ past can move between generations” (Frankish and Bradbury, 2012: 296). Although the epic left-wing experience of the 1970s was neither irretrievable nor repeatable for subsequent generations, they “share common predominant concerns” with older generations, “but producing radically different responses to them” (Keightley and Pickering, 2013: 116), namely trauma and nostalgia. Here, nostalgia “functions as the search for continuity” (Tannock, 1995: 456), building a connection with the more experienced veteran left-wingers. Wydra (2018: 7) refers to how the agonizing experiences of the older generation, such as forced migration or aborted life opportunities, influenced the formative years of the younger generation and resulted in the latter adapting “their life course by connecting with older generations.” Here, nostalgia also emerges as the feeling of adaptation, connecting with the former generation and finding a continuity between successive generations.

Finding/giving meaning to the past

As well as factual losses, traumatic experience also causes loss of meaning; Meeter (2016: 344) tells patients “crave instead of forgetting is meaning, that is, being able to give trauma a meaningful place in their life narrative.” Trauma corrodes temporality by causing a rupture between past and present and mutilating future hopes and visions. Nostalgia may appear as an effort to give/find meaning to the past, which involves radical transformations (Davis, 1979: 97–117; Fritzsche, 2001), senses of rupture and loss (Whitehead, 2010) and a radical break between the past and present which creates its own temporality. Considering the 12 September coup as either of these draws at least on two causes. First, the military validated its actions by crafting an official narrative that starkly divided the time “before” and “after” the coup. ⁸ This narrative of a “radical break” was also reinforced by a series of critical texts on Turkey’s coup period, which have become canonical over time. Turan (2013: 4) indicates how a 1970s narrative identified with a “general terror, chaos, black market and crisis period” profoundly influenced the tradition constituent of analysis in political economics. It is clear that the country went into an unprecedented transformation, but the cultural signification of the event almost indicates an ahistorical break between two decades. The coup’s cultural signification is potentially a source for the emergence of nostalgia. The discourse of radical break—both official and critical—also marked the 12 September coup as a moment of significant loss in the country’s fate. “If 12 September had not happened . . .” became the starting point for optimistic fantasies about the country. The despair brought about by the AKP’s (Justice and Development Party) two decades in power has often been attributed to the destruction of left-wing politics by the 12 September coup and its promotion of political Islam. Consequently, the 12 September coup is seen as the root cause of the turmoil the country has experienced in recent decades. As a result, nostalgia in subsequent generations becomes a means of giving a meaning to the “here and now” (Sremac and Van Liere, 2024: 19). Nostalgia symbolizes a sorrowful reflection on a troublesome past that has led the country to its present state. Since the past is viewed as a missed opportunity, nostalgia is also linked to a broader concept of temporality. The feelings of loss and the search for meaning influence the future, and that’s why nostalgia often embodies utopian visions. Rather than a request for returning to a frozen, fixed past, nostalgia has the potential to enable recognizing “aspects of the past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in the future” (Pickering and Keightley, 2006: 921) through functioning as “a compass a means of direction amid the uncertainties and predicaments of the present and the future” (Hook, 2012: 229). The “unrealized possibilities, unpredictable turns and crossroads” (Boym, 2007: 10) inherent in nostalgia provide it with utopian visions.

These enable us to see trauma and nostalgia as “dialectic partners” (Sremac and Van Liere, 2024: 23), encouraging more effort to invest in the intricate relationship between the two. “Combination of trauma and nostalgia can produce different ‘approaches’ every time” (Panico, 2024: 82) and we need to carefully analyze the traumatic event in question and the specific context through which trauma is succeeded by nostalgia. It is still a crucial question why some traumatic events trigger nostalgia while others do not. I argue that the sense of rupture lies at the center of the nexus of trauma and nostalgia. By scrutinizing this rupture, we can come close to building a tangible relationship between these two. Nostalgia and trauma are matters of a sense of rupture, which is the birthplace of both. This is why we are driven to reflect historically on the event, the temporality it incurs, and the continuities and discontinuities it implies. However, the sense of rupture is still a vague and abstract term and needs to be solidified. What makes a historical event experienced through the sense of rupture?

A sense of rupture is inherent in a traumatic event. However, silence following traumatic events significantly impacts the socialization of this sense of rupture. Silencing effect of a traumatic event between two generations is as significant a means of transmission as representations and the spoken word, and sometimes even more critical. Hirsch (2001: 9) argues that postmemory is a powerful form of memory because it is “often based on silence rather than speech, on the invisible rather than the visible.” Moreover, postmemory does not necessarily suggest a familial relation; it is much more inclusive. Hirsch (2001: 10) coins the term as an “intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance.” The silence that follows a traumatic event leaves a void for subsequent generations to gaze upon with curiosity. However, to problematize the silence when examining the relationship between trauma and nostalgia, we must also empiricize it. Just as Herzog (2009) explains that forgetting—because forgetting is an ontological impossibility; forgetting is instead a dominant memory’s marginalization of those outside of itself—is not a valid term in the study of collective memory, or as Keightley and Pickering (2013) object to the ineffability of trauma, we need to operationalize silence rather than attributing it directly to trauma. So, again, we have to look to representations to see silence. Because those representations bequeath “broken, forestalled, viewing relations” (Hirsch, 2001: 28) to subsequent generations and can shape both their identities and the way they construct the past:

The concealed or media- and narrative-based transmissions of their ancestors’ traumatic experiences consume the characters and force them to search for their own identities. They use a variety of methods and means to reconstruct the past, in an attempt to create greater clarity about their individual situation in the present (Anastasiadis, 2012: 2).

This article delves into the silence surrounding the coup in detail in the following section. I posit that the memory of 12 September is not an absence but rather a “lacunae” intrinsic to it. This silence and lacunae shape the identities of subsequent generations and form the foundation for their nostalgia for 12 September. Nostalgia, in the case of the 12 September coup, is a means for subsequent generations to reconstruct the past. Understanding how silence operates in practice sheds light on the construction of the relationship between trauma and nostalgia.

The context of the silence and lacunae around the coup

The collective memory of the 12 September coup was dependent upon the socio-political developments and legal changes of the following decades. Despite the existence of a body of work that memorialized the coup, this memory was essentially characterized by lacunae and silences which can be examined in terms of three layers that reach from the individual to the macro level—levels of politics of memory in Turkey.

On the first and individual level, lay the traumatic features of the coup experience which clearly hinders its expression. While the commonality of experience forges bonds among the sufferers that reinforces the collective memory and enhances solidarity, it paradoxically brings about the inability to speak about the personal and intimate character of the coup experience. Rather, the common experience is expressed through a narrative emphasizing that “whatever experienced is experienced all together” or “all that happened, happened to them all.” Accounts of torture, maltreatment and prison experiences are usually omitted or covered over with (or even replaced by) a generalizing narrative on the coup focusing on the structural transformation of the country (Orhon, 2015: 102–109) in which the sufferer’s “I” is usually missing. “Trauma happens, often with no experiencing ‘I’” (Auerhahn and Laub, 1998: 23) and the absence of “I” in personal stories and the use of a generalizing narrative may have served as a means of coping with the surface traumatic experience and even as a tool for healing; but, at the same time, it has become a form of silence about what is genuinely traumatic and hurtful. The words by writer and documentarist Ümit Kıvanç ⁹ who experienced the coup in his early twenties give an idea about the unconscious silence of a generation about their own experiences:

We were the generation on which the 12 September coup fell, we even didn’t know how many of us suffered from torture (hundreds of thousands of us were tortured). We even didn’t imagine that we may need to be rehabilitated. I recognized that we who spent their youth similarly have actually never thought about it. We were a generation which barely accepted that we needed rehabilitation.

The second level of silence is related to the legal constraints and the continuity of the coup mentality that accompanied it which considerably obstructed the representation of the coup experience. President Kenan Evren remained in post until 1989 while the nationwide martial law that had overwhelmed daily life remained in effect until 1987. More importantly, the coup’s rage against the memory of the period prior to it and the legal mechanisms of censorship expanding toward self-censorship stood as the main obstacles against the representation. As will be explained in detail in the following section, the representation of the coup experience was characterized by an implicit expression of it using an ambiguous leitmotiv that was, however, only a suggestion of the atmosphere of the coup but leaving semantic gaps behind.

The silence around the 12 September coup is firmly related to the tradition of the politics of memory in Turkey. This constitutes the third layer of silence but one which is also closely connected to the first two. Denial of a problematic past is one constituent of a tradition adopted by the state in Turkey. ¹⁰ The 12 September coup stands as one example of an official pattern of denial along with a series of past wrongdoings such as the Armenian Genocide (1915), Dersim massacre (1938), massacres against the Alevi community and so forth. However, one needs to identify the idiosyncratic features of state denial around different historical events in the Turkish context. Denial, remaining the same in essence, is put into practice through different policies, and thus through different mechanisms, depending on the historical event in question. Akçam (2021) describes different phases of silence and denial around the Armenian Genocide in which 1915–1970 is characterized by silence and the post-1970s is the initial phase of the “new denial policies” by the Turkish State through banning critical debates around the genocide until the 1990s (p. 146), and the “demolition of the wall of silence” (p. 151). Regarding 12 September, Ulucanlar Prison stands as an extraordinary example as the formerly military prison was turned into a museum by the government, “instrumentalized for populist politics” (Ugur-Cinar and Altınok, 2021: 119) through reconstructing the traumatic past and re-functionalizing the place for “a quest for the extension of power.” Although the museumification project is an effort to have a say on the 12 September coup by the state, by imposing a monolithic vision of the coup, it is actually a form of silencing, “silencing pluralism in the society” with regard to the representation of the coup experience and memory.

This tradition of state denial was temporarily put aside with the coming to power in 2002 of the Islamist-neoliberalist AKP (Justice and Development Party) who had a strong objection to military domination in politics. The AKP government’s initial acts against this domination also attracted the support of liberal and left-wing groups in society and also seemed to mark a mental rupture from the previous era. However, the period barely changed the general features of the coup memory.

Scrutinizing the silence and the lacunae

One of the first and decisive attempts of the military was to organize extensive house searches and the confiscation of books, magazines, photographs, and personal belongings immediately after staging the coup. Orhon (2015: 82) refers to how this process had to be internalized by left-wingers who exclusively narrated destroying their books and personal belongings before the military came to search their houses and describes this massive operation as a “destruction of sites of memory.” These were the initial steps of the state-promoted suppression which duly continued through mechanisms of strict censorship along with other authoritarian executions. Although cultural production invented ways to get round the censorships, ¹¹ the limits of two major means of representation, cinema and literature, were clearly determined by the censorship mechanisms. Censorship was a tool for political and social repression and prevailed throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the Turkish cinema and directly affected the content of films (Tekin, 2013: 7). Films about the 12 September shot in the 1980s “revolved around autobiographical accounts of political ideologies which were suppressed rather than treating 12 September as their main referent” (Tekin, 2013: 10). This was a tactical move to surmount the over-reaching censorship; however, it also meant getting round the legally untellable coup experience and inevitably missed a plain and explicit representation of it. More importantly, censorship throughout the 1980s and 1990s prevailed as a self-censorship in the cinema (Tekin, 2013: 36). Günay-Erkol and Şenol-Sert (2017: 12) make a similar observation about literature after the 12 September and posit that state censorship turned into self-censorship among writers and that the 12 September partly became an implicit focus for literature. A series of writers published novels throughout the 1980s, but none of these were texts that touched on the experience of September 12 with a clarity and sharpness of memory (Orhon, 2023). Fiction, both in literature and cinema, served as a periphrasis of the crystal-clear coup experience. In the 1990s, although the first and highly exceptional examples of memoirs about the coup were published, the inclination to take the coup as an implicit focus prevailed. The publication of journalistic accounts of the coup years was a common tendency among journalists during these two decades but these not only appealed to a limited group of readers but also “mainly focused on the pressure applied to the press during the period of military power and presented descriptive-documentary accounts of the period prior and subsequent to the coup” (Orhon, 2015: 64).

The beginning of the 2000s, together with the 2010 referendum that amended the 1982 Constitution which subsequently enabled the trial of the members of the National Security Council, ¹² triggered a “narrative opening” which enabled the “opportunity for new political stories to be told, featuring new plots and non-traditional characters” (Hart, 1996: 78). This temporary narrative opening contributed to the popularization of the coup memory in the form of political television dramas (Emre Çetin, 2014), in movies portraying the coup experience through the use of dark humor or a tragicomic style, ¹³ and in works of fiction and memoirs. The literal silence on the side of the surviving left-wing activists was provisionally suspended and some were able to publicize their experiences by the 2000s (Pekesen, 2020: 491). However, the 12 September trials were simply part of the AKP’s (Justice and Development Party) political maneuvering, and the impact of this short period between 2010 and 2013 to a large extent remained limited. ¹⁴ 2013 simultaneously marked the AKP’s rigid gravitation toward authoritarianism and the end of the short-term attempts at coming to terms with the coup’s past.

A concise evaluation on the coup memory reveals that the silence around the coup is a qualitative rather than a quantitative one. This silence, which was undoubtedly initiated by the military power but self-imposed on actors who might otherwise represent the coup experience and then expanded to cover larger segments of the society in due course, can be considered as an amalgamation of what Connerton (2008) defines as “repressive erasure” and “humiliated silence.” Whereas repressive erasure, which is peculiar to totalitarian regimes, is “employed to deny a historical rupture” (p. 60), humiliated silence refers to a “collusive silence brought on by a particular kind of collective shame” (p. 64). This amalgamation indicates a silence which was initiated by mechanisms employed by the military regime for creating a mnemonic rupture between the 1970s and 1980s but was then adopted and internalized by the society which witnessed the cruelties the coup caused but who stood as bystanders. To Toker (2005: 55), those who remained unresponsive were equally liable for what the coup caused, and Laçiner (2005: 18) posits that Turkish society in general did not have the sense of responsibility for the period before the coup and, thus, did not see the coup as a move against itself. The coup successfully engraved the perception that the staging of it was the only solution. The lacunae and silences characterizing the coup memory remained for the four decades following the coup and this legacy of silence stands at the center of the transgenerational memory of it.

12 September trauma as replaced by the “epic” ¹⁷ 1970s

To ask a 12 September veteran whether she desires to re-experience the 1970s is actually an inappropriate question as it is almost like asking whether one would like to re-live the traumatic past. However, for the members of subsequent generations, the 1970s appear to have an image of a decade framed with revolutionary courage and boldness in which daily life was more worth living thanks to the social solidarity enabled through a widely organized society. During the interviews, I asked the interviewees whether there was another period of time when they would have liked to have lived. As interviews were framed by the memory of the coup, many of the answers were affirmative and could be read along the lines of “Yes, I would have liked to have lived in the 1970s” as they largely believe that the 1980s (initiated by the staging of the coup) refers to a huge loss. Berrin (1982 F) was one of them, and in the following section, she describes what she thinks the 1970s were like while talking about what was lost:

The left-wing dwindled, it became miniscule. Some values were lost. Loss of all those people, loss of the people to the right also means the loss of those values. The belief in the collective, that the collective can change things, it can change the system, that it can enable one to have a say about her own life were lost. I mean, degeneracy is not a very [useful] notion, but I mean, if very valuable things are assumed to become worthless overnight, then this is degeneracy.

The 1970s refer to a period in which the capacity for political agency is felt so strongly for those who were not born then. This idea stems from being informed about how the coup irreversibly eradicated a democratic way of life that had flourished throughout the 1970s. In Berrin’s account, the expression “became worthless overnight” and the idea of losing all the things that were valued in such a short time are a reflection of the sense of rupture and how this sense of rupture had broader repercussions for the members of subsequent generations. It may be thought that it is natural for a left-winger to consider the 1970s in such positive terms but rather what is striking in the narrative about the 1970s is that the fully positive image of the decade overshadows the trauma that the 12 September coup brought about. More importantly, the 1970s become synonymous with the coup itself and the 12 September almost becomes a generic term referring to the epic 1970s rather than the coup. The questions regarding the 12 September coup, which is acknowledged to be a moment of radical transformation even for the “lay person” in Turkey, is answered through a narrative about the experience prior to the coup.

Legg (2004: 103) reminds us that both trauma and nostalgia “represent problematic engagements with the past,” but its nostalgia’s distinctive feature to focus on “a time and place before or beyond a traumatic incident.” The traumatic coup experience is replaced by a powerful and gleaming narrative of the 1970s which casts a veil over the traumatic experiences itself, indeed one that is even able to replace it. The 1970s become the name for a “pre-lapsarian world” (Tannock, 1995: 457) and the expression “12 September” on its own turns into an expression with epic associations that are partly independent of the event’s real content. In some narratives, nostalgia manifests itself through the claim that the 1970s were somehow more genuine. In Canan’s (1992 F) words, the 12 September nostalgia is revealed through the claim that the 1970s were imbued with authenticity:

That times were more sincere. I mean, than you are now unable to find. Those companionship relations are the real ones. There are such ties of affection that my father still after forty years [pursues] with uncle K [an old companion of her father]. [. . .]. It’s different in those times, there was a power, a belief, people sacrificed their lives because of their beliefs. Today’s left-wingers, consider, are they people who will sacrifice their lives now? [. . .]. My father came to Turkey as a fugitive [after the coup] and his friend brings him here through declaring that he is his adopted child. If it [this lie] were exposed when they were back, both of them would have gone to jail. They would be heavily tortured. [. . .]. Today, if we run the same risk for someone, we can never know whether you’ll be betrayed or not.

Despite not being fully active, Canan (1992 F), the speaker in the aforementioned account, herself is also currently a member of a political party as she believes that being in an organization means that “one holds one’s head high.” What she says about her father goes beyond her isolated impressions about his past social relationships to make claims about how they really were in the 1970s. She frequently makes a contrast between her current experience of belonging to a political organization and her companionship with those of the former generation. This contrast is functional in highlighting the claim to authenticity. Nevra (1977 F) similarly builds a contrast, but she first mentions the irreversible loss that the 12 September brought about:

It’s not only the people who were lost, all that accumulated [struggled for] democracy, I mean human rights, organization, organization of the left-wing, all those who were walked over. [. . .] The word “loss” epitomizes all. But when you say “loss,” you presume you’ll find it again. That’s why I hesitated about the expression “loss.” I mean, you can’t find it again.

Distinctly, because of growing up in a multi-child and crowded family, Nevra is familiar with the previous generation because of her older siblings. Despite growing up in the same small conservative city, she tells how her older siblings, who were in their late teens in the 1970s and used to be left-wingers, currently have varied biographies and world-views. The city she and her siblings were raised in is currently politically aligned with Islamist conservatism, and Nevra describes the apparent contrast between her teens (in the 1980s) and her siblings, particularly, what her teens lacked:

There were associations and things everywhere. People’s social environment, relations, world-views changed in that period. I can still feel it with my older siblings because of that period. From the clothes they wore to their world-view. They surprised me a lot when I was getting divorced. I expected them to be more conservative. I see they have experiences and it’s being reflected on me. My sister says emancipation, whatever . . . It’s not a coincidence. [. . .] After my two elder siblings—we are eight siblings—it [holding a left-wing world-view] suddenly got chopped. It was different back then. For example, my three younger brothers are apolitical. Apolitical and they never read. [. . .] The generation I’m speaking about, the former one, they read a lot.

Nevra describes the rupture that the coup caused through its effects on her family. She relates the reaction of her older siblings to a family crisis (her divorce) with their former engagement with left-wing politics in the 1970s. To her, their reactions diverge from those of the rest of the family because of their former political affiliation to the left. Her emphasis on “reading a lot” is a common one made by most of the interviewees when talking about the 1970s. One of the most determinant acts of the coup was to confiscate left-wing books and magazines and even burn them en masse (Orhon, 2015: 81–89), and that act refers to a purposeful effort to extinguish the cultural bonds between the generations. Talking about books and reading appears as a symbol for pointing to the gap between the generations. The members of the subsequent generations idolize reading and having books and the act of reading becomes sublimated into a component of the nostalgic remembering of the period prior to the coup.

Sense of guilt, longing and paying tribute to the former generation

The relationship between nostalgia and guilt is problematic and nostalgia is often seen as “history without guilt” (Kammen, cited in Boym, 2007: 9). Such a conception of nostalgia functions as a way of getting rid of the sense of collective guilt. Orhon (2015: 136–139) argued that non-politically affiliated people who at the time welcomed the coup now consider the right- and left-wingers of the 1970s, who were in armed conflict with each other and thought to be the cause of the polarization within society, as “pure,” “sincere,” and “honest” people. This indicates a nostalgia that views the human relations of the time as somehow authentic and implies a kind of nostalgia that covers the collective guilt of these bystanders. However, in the 12 September case, another form of guilt is also involved. Damousi (2001: 8), for instance, tells how the survival guilt of Australian men who returned home after the Second World War and wars in Korea and Vietnam was internalized by their surviving wives. Likewise, it is possible to observe a similar sense of guilt in the survivors of the coup. As the children of either the bystanders or the survivors of the coup, the nostalgia of the subsequent generations is intensely related to either of these forms of guilt. This specific sense of guilt is considerably reinforced by the strong association between youth and depolitization brought about by the coup which was almost conventionally ignored when reflecting on the youth after the 1980s. Regardless of what decade they were born in, those born from the 1970s to the 2000s were defined as “post-1980 youth,” the “children of September 12,” the “children of Özal” or the “Tele-Vole generation” (Lüküslü, 2020: 132–133) ¹⁸ and were almost always negatively portrayed by social convention and often accused of being “apolitical.” Intellectuals who experienced the September 12 defeat also played an important role in this negative portrayal (Lüküslü, 2020: 120) which may have also caused a problematic relationship between older and younger generations.

The members of the subsequent generations frequently consider their political practices as a continuation of the 1970s. The parallel they draw between their political practice and that of the 1970s can be seen as a tribute to the earlier generations through a lens of nostalgia. In this case, nostalgia refers to a feeling which “sustains identity by serving as ‘the primary means by which one maintains relationships with old parts of the self’” (cited in Batcho, 2013: 356), a self which is thought of as the continuation of the revolutionary struggle of the 1970s. Ayşe (1990 F) constantly compares her political practice, but more importantly her daily life, with what she has learnt about the 1970s’ revolutionaries. Most of her account is characterized by a sense of guilt. Even when she was a child, she speaks about feeling guilty while listening to pop music. She experiences listening to pop music as a feeling of getting distanced from the earlier generation’s habits, a mood enhanced by her assumption that she is actually a successor to the earlier generations:

Feeling guilty when listening to music, different kinds of music. [. . .] Never ever listening to Serdar Ortaç after the “Fork case,” ¹⁹ and not even going into a place where his songs are played, if possible. And feeling guilty of listening to Sertab Erener [a pop singer]. Seeing that she makes a little political statement or that she is vegan, saying “Oh, that’s OK then . . .”. Understanding she holds water, and then forgiving myself, affirming myself . . .

The sense of guilt also reveals itself in political practice. This is a mournful nostalgia brought about by the coup’s act of irrevocably annihilating the revolutionary movement when it was in its heyday. As if there is no difference between the socio-political context of the 1970s and that of their own times, Ayşe again compares her political activism with that of the 1970s and concludes that her generation’s activism is completely inadequate and is submerged by feelings of guilt:

What they managed to do was huge! We flatter ourselves as if we’ve made the revolution even when we organize a memorial to Ahmet Kaya. Generations before us, they robbed banks, occupied schools, raided classes, invaded lectures. Ah, we also raided an İlber Ortaylı ²⁰ conference and got it be cancelled, whatever! [laughs sarcastically]. They’ve done great jobs, I wish we were in those times, but then. . .

The retrospective lens that aggrandizes the activities of the former generation of left-wingers in her narrative is synonymous with underrating the current generation of left-wingers. The sense of guilt accompanying the retrospection inevitably leads to glorifying the past. It is sometimes manifested differently as is the case with Mehmet (1984 M). Mehmet, the nephew of a murdered uncle by armed fascists a few years before the coup, tells how he integrates his daily life with remembrance of the period. He talks about floating around the streets of Ankara, the city in which he lives, and spontaneously recalling and mapping the violent political events at the end of the 1970s. In Mehmet’s account, remembering defines his spatial experiences of the city that he lives in:

It’s not solely about my uncle, but it’s of course influential. Those people killed. . . For instance, I recognized that I don’t know most of the students killed in Cebeci, ²¹ I learnt about it later. They all died in vain, killed in the middle of the day and their murderers were never found. [. . .] Now that I walk in Ankara, [I recall that] this happened there and that happened there, with no accurate locations of course. It [must have] happened around there. I know my uncle’s university, his neighborhood, where he was killed. He [must have] carried out his political activities around there.

Left-wing practices in Turkey involve an intense memorializing of the events of the 1970s—a tradition which also clearly indicates the insistence to connect with former generations. However, what Mehmet tells us is the striking nature of the bond between two generations as he voluntarily carries the traces of a period he has never experienced to his daily life. Paying tribute to the former generation is concretized in his act, so to speak, of trailing the murdered. In some cases, instead of a sense of guilt and paying tribute, the nostalgia manifests itself in a more direct form, as the longing for a past that has not been experienced and demanding the presence of its “goodness” here and now for current generation. As Berrin (1982 F) explains:

Why couldn’t we all live like that? We’d like to experience it too. It’s not only a longing for solidarity. Also a longing for power. Being powerful, being a member of a politically powerful wing. [. . .] The possibility, the capacity to imagine a different world, the power to be able to realize this collectively. [. . .] I mean hope, effort, fight and not only imagination. Imaginary. An imagery, an imaginary of a different world. Actively reflecting on it, detailing it, planning, building and the ability to construct it. [. . .]. To me the generation of those days, in some ways, is a more brilliant generation than ours. A generation which would have been able to do great things if they hadn’t received that blow [of the coup]. [. . .] I mean, searching for a new language, a new aesthetic, imagining a new world, imagining a place for yourself in that world. Demanding that place and working for it. This is something big, beautiful and something that improved those people a lot.

Berrin’s words exclude a sense of guilt and manifest a more explicit longing for the 1970s. Like some others, her words illustrate the sense of loss brought about by the coup and deeply felt by the members of subsequent generations. While remembering the coup, the members of the younger generations bring the legacy of the coup into existence through different mechanisms and describe the 1970s as a utopian home. Even the question of why these young people are so closely acquainted with a decade when they were not even born triggers an interest in the place that the 12 September coup has in connecting consecutive generations to each other.