Unusual times: Remembering Turkey’s long sixties

Abstract

The two decades spanning from 1960 to 1980 in Turkey marked a period of profound socio-political change, characterized by the emergence of new ideas, movements, and transformations that significantly influenced the entire society. This era, punctuated by three coups d’état and other pivotal historical events, shaped the formative experiences of diverse members of the young generation of time, regardless of their level of involvement. This article seeks to present a pluralistic memory narrative of Turkey’s long sixties, derived from the lived experiences of ordinary people, rather than solely focusing on the perspectives of activist individuals of the time. In doing so, the article aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of Turkey’s long sixties, shedding light on both the violence and utopian ideals that characterized the era. Furthermore, it seeks to contribute to an “agonistic memory” narrative of this contested period by acknowledging its complexity and bringing to light other perspectives alongside the dominant narratives.

Introduction

The 1960s—or the long sixties ¹ —were undoubtedly a turbulent long decade, and a time for the burgeoning of a global youth culture centered around cultural awakening and political revolt, as well as future ideals, cultural practices, music, and clothing styles (Jian et al., 2018). Local differences, however, brought along sui generis and plural experiences shaped according to the needs of the national and cultural contexts. What is common, however, is that this was a period in which utopia and conflict were intertwined (Gildea, 2013), marked by profound cultural, social, and political events, and thus “should be seen as a generational period in scope” (Christofis, 2021: 111). “As elsewhere, the Turkish 1960s does not constitute a coherent ‘time-unity,’” Christofis (2021: 119) rightly states. Here, however, I discuss Turkey’s long sixties, dating it to the turbulent period between 1960 and 1980, which was marked by three military interventions, numerous social movements, countless bloody conflicts, and a deep economic crisis, alongside the unique cultural practices of the time. While scholars primarily focus on the activist figures, movements, and political organizations of the period, such studies often ignore the diverse experiences and memories of individuals with loose ideological ties or who did not participate in political movements.

In this article, however, my aim is to address this gap by exploring the diverse memories and narratives of generation members who lived through the tumultuous period of Turkey’s “long sixties.” By employing a hermeneutic analysis of in-depth interviews, the article seeks to reveal a diverse and pluralistic memory narrative of this era. This narrative gives voice to the perspectives and subjectivities of those on the “other” side of the long sixties generation—individuals who, despite being leftist, tended to stay away from anything but the major protests, who had a right-wing worldview, or who did not directly engage in political ideas, but who were influenced by them in some way. Using the communicative/social memory approach, I offer a more nuanced understanding of Turkey’s long sixties, highlighting both the utopian ideals and violence that characterized the period. In doing so, I attempt to contribute to an “agonistic memory” (Bull and Hansen, 2016) narrative of this contested period, making visible the complexity of the past and other perspectives, along with the dominant narratives. Put differently, in this study, I look into the memories of those who experienced the same formative events of a common socio-historical period, as Mannheim (1952) mentions; but rather than adopting his emphasis on ideological distinctiveness or antagonist generation units, I treat the generation as “a magnetic field at the center of which lies an experience or a series of experiences” (Wohl, 1979: 210).

This magnetic field, however, does not draw all contemporaries to the center but rather scatters them to different parts of the experiential space. After all, each generation also consists of a large number of people who are distant, indifferent, and unnoticed (Assmann, 2018: 1). Hajek (2013: 4) claims that discussions in some European countries challenged the dominant narratives of the “image of 1968 as an exclusively ‘left-wing’ phenomenon,” recognizing other memory agents involved within this generational scope. Thanks to this interest, she writes, “debates about the legacy of 1968 have . . . become more complex, and its memory is no longer ‘owned’ by a single memory group” (Hajek, 2013: 4). Recently, for example, Anna von der Goltz (2021) also showed the perspective and role of the Christian Democrat youth in the student protests of Germany’s 1968. Similarly, Turkey’s long sixties should also be understood from the individual narratives of all the other memory agents who shared the same historical conditions and temporality. Such an approach would contribute to an “agonistic memory” narrative about a controversial past in which violence was a determining characteristic along with utopian ideals. Recognizing the complexity of this period of Turkey’s history and challenging the dominant narratives can lead to a genuine understanding and reckoning that considers the experiences of all memory agents, regardless of their degree of involvement, and focuses on the field of experience that, like a “magnetic field,” contains various forms of engagement.

Narratives used in this article are drawn from a series of in-depth interviews I conducted with 35 members of the long sixties generation (i.e. those born in the 1940s and 1950s) in 2017–2018. However, among these, I have only used here the narratives of 17 interviewees (6 women and 11 men) to give more prominence to the narratives of “other” members of the generation who stayed in gray zones. The interviews underwent transcription and analysis employing hermeneutic analysis (Rabinow and Sullivan, 1987), rooted in the fundamental principles of understanding and interpretation within social and historical contexts. This method, ideal for grasping the dialogical and intersubjective nature of memory, facilitates ongoing reinterpretations influenced by individual and collective contexts. Hermeneutic analysis also provides a reflexive framework in memory studies, emphasizing the interpretive continuum shared between the researcher and the researched. The central point in this article will, therefore, be the meanings that various members of this generation ascribe to the past, as hermeneutic analysis allows “going back and forth between the topic of study, the context, and [researcher’s] own understanding” (Willis et al., 2007: 106). The in-depth interview technique is especially meaningful here as it provides rich data to explore subjects’ perspectives and shared meanings regarding the past. It should also be noted that interviews are meaningful as social and communicative situations in which individuals construct different versions of reality according to their worldviews within the context of the interview (Mihelj, 2013: 62). Thus, a fully representative story is not pursued here, which is not possible for any research that adopts interview method. Instead, in what follows, I present an intertextual text or a “mosaic of narratives” highlighting the absorption and transformation of one text into another (Kristeva, 1980: 66). That is, the overall narrative of this article consists of excerpts from interview transcriptions that turned into texts, various text adaptations, and my process of understanding and interpreting all these.

Interplay between individual and collective memory

While memory studies have continued to develop as a multidisciplinary field, especially since the “memory boom” of the 1980s, the tension between individual and collective memory remains an unresolved issue (Keightley et al., 2019). Although Halbwachs is credited with identifying the mutually exclusive relationship between these two memory levels, Gensburger (2016) suggests revisiting his treatment of the issue. Halbwachs (1980: 48) emphasized that “while the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember.” Individual memory is not something to be set aside, but rather a complementary and active level of the collective memory phenomenon. According to Gensburger’s (2016: 401) interpretation of Halbwachs’ works, collective memory is defined by social structure, an individual’s place within it, and the evolution of that structure. Therefore, examining the places of as many individuals as possible in the collective and how different social dynamics shape their memories can provide new insights into the different meanings attributed to the past. Calls for greater attention to the individual level have emerged earlier in the history of memory studies. For instance, Susan Crane (1997: 1375), in her 1997 article, “Writing the Individual Back into the Collective Memory,” suggested “relocating the collective back in the individual who articulates it.” Similarly, Wulf Kansteiner (2002, 2010) contended that the individual’s role in collective memory is ignored in memory research.

In this sense, one of the approaches to consider the relationship between the two levels of memory is conceiving them as communicative/social memory activities, as proposed by Aleida and Jan Assmann. Jan Assmann (2008; Assmann and Czaplicka, 1995) divides collective memory into two dimensions: communicative memory and cultural memory. Based on everyday communication, communicative memory deals with the recent past shared by contemporaries and has a limited temporal horizon extending over 80 or 100 years. Without fixed points in time, communicative memory is linked to individual experiences and social interactions. It indicates the social aspect of individual memory and its temporariness. However, a “fixity can only be achieved through a cultural formation and therefore lies outside of informal everyday memory,” or in other words, it is possible with a transition to an “institutionalized” form of memory, that is cultural memory (Assmann and Czaplicka, 1995: 127). In a similar vein, Aleida Assmann (2006: 213) identifies four levels or “formats of memory,” including political and cultural memory, apart from individual and social/communicative memory. She, too, emphasizes that individual and social memories, based on lived experience and interaction between individuals, need more resilient bearers of external symbols and material representations to transform into political and cultural memory.

One of the forms of time-limited social/communicative memory belongs to social generations, outlined by Karl Mannheim (Assmann, 2006: 214), which are “very zeitgeist-dependent constructs through which people, as members of a specific age group, are located or locate themselves historically, and accordingly create a we-feeling” (Reulecke, 2008: 119). In fact, what is narrated by various people in this article fits into the social/communicative memory approach, as it is about a period that has been the temporal home of the individual and the collective experiences of a living generation. Yet, this 20-year period also includes various historical events which have been commemorated and memorialized. Besides, subjective past interpretations of generation members are closely tied to the politics of memory and the ongoing exchanges between collective and individual memories, which are mediated in various ways. Therefore, in line with Assmanns’ perspective, it would not be wrong to say that some aspects of communicative memory here have been evolving toward a collective/cultural memory framework with long-term cultural reference points.

History and memory of the sixties and beyond in Turkey

The demarcation line of the sixties in Turkey is generally considered to be May 27, 1960—the date of the coup d’état by a group of military officials known as the National Unity Committee (NUC) against the Democratic Party (DP) government (Kaynar, 2017b). On this date, the NUC members overthrew the DP administration, believing it had strayed from the Republican goals and values, and following the subsequent show trials, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and his two ministers were executed in 1961. Paradoxically, the 1961 Constitution enacted after the coup, having “relatively” the most liberal features, opened the door to the most significant years in Turkish political history (Özkazanç, 2012; Tekeli, 2013). Parallel to this, leftist movements gained considerable momentum in the 1960s, creating a politically favorable environment.

The sixties, therefore, were a watershed moment for Turkey in several ways. There was neither the gloomy, recessive state of the forties spent in the shadow of World War II nor the sudden freedoms, transformation, and entertainment of the fifties that lacked a distinct style. The sixties, however, were the years in which the urban and rural cultures came into conflict, when young people became political actors and mobilized other social groups, when the working class expanded, when a heterogeneous urban culture emerged, and when local cultures gained prominence (Barbaros and Zürcher, 2013: viii). Furthermore, this period witnessed significant industrialization and economic growth (Boratav, 2018: 132–133). Compared to the past, products that gained popularity as a result of the declining prices led to changes in daily life in the form of new temporal experiences, affecting a broad segment of society. For example, in 1960, radios could be found in 991,214 homes in the provincial and district centers, and in 290,849 in the sub-districts and villages, but by 1964, these figures had reached 1,465,101 and 614,221, respectively (Kocabaşoğlu, 2010: 452), meaning that lives became similar across a more comprehensive geography. The radio allowed simultaneous access to political, social, and cultural agendas, as well as the collective experience of the spirit of the time.

The 1960s also saw a boom in magazine and newspaper publishing, and the newspapers with the highest circulation began to reach even the most remote corners of the nation (Alpay, 2010: 375). The television (TV) broadcasts that were introduced in 1968 were an essential development. TVs gained popularity in the late 1970s, providing Turkish culture with the same view as the rest of the world, albeit they could not yet be found in every home. As “the most obvious means of representation of the time” (Harvey, 1990: 207), the movies even found viewers in the villages through mobile movie theaters, improving the temporal and spatial experiences of the rural dwellers.

The libertarian wind of the sixties shifted direction with the March 12, 1971 coup, after which the political left was subjected to a witch hunt (Zürcher, 2004: 258). The fundamental rights and freedoms strengthened by the 1961 Constitution, which introduced a comparatively libertarian era, were swept away, and the Constitution’s state–citizen balance swung in favor of the state (Sevinç, 2014: 135). The late seventies in particular saw an increase in violence, armed conflict between the right and left, and unstable coalition governments, all of which culminated in a further coup d’état on September 12, 1980, but with more severe outcomes. This last coup of the period “was a ‘milestone,’ the consequences of which have been shadowing the lives of the peoples in Turkey for more than thirty years” (Orhon, 2015: 1). Also, in 1982, a new Constitution that annihilated all the democratic rights acquired with the 1961 Constitution was enacted. The eighties began in the shadow of the coup and marked a new era in which neo-liberal policies held sway following years of curfews and a standstill in cultural production.

After September 12, a new ideology and identity based on a Turkish–Islamic synthesis began to replace the Republic’s secular and Western founding ideals, while the Ottoman past that the Republic had obscured started to accompany nostalgic glorification under the name of “neo-Ottomanism” (Aydın and Taşkın, 2016: 164–168). The most recent manifestation of this synthesis and nostalgic embellishment has been the Justice and Development Party (AKP; Tokdoğan, 2024), which has dominated the political landscape since 2002, and has gradually increased its authoritative and repressive grip over the last 10 years. For the left, the September 12 coup was the start of a period of deep trauma and defeat, and was a turning point of a lost past, or borrowing from Robert Darnton’s quote on the French Revolution, a lost “possibili[ty] against the givenness of things” (quoted in Varon et al., 2008: 1).

On the other hand, it is worth noting that the social movements and events of the sixties and seventies were undoubtedly not equally crucial for all segments of society. There was also an emerging right-wing, nationalist pole in opposition to the left-wing pole. No matter which poles one belonged to, the developments were not crucial for everyone with the same intensity or meaningful for the same duration. There were shifting tendencies or neutralities. For these and other variables, in changing times and for changing individuals, “the development of individuals depended on how they related to the collective formations of their contemporaries” (Corsten, 1999: 257). However, in one way or another, the political environment surrounding the period was characterized by a Zeitgeist dominated by the leftist imprint. Therefore, we can say that what marked the sixties and seventies in Turkey were the socio-political and cultural forms created by leftist thought and the reactions, mainly from the right, that developed against them.

However, as Pekesen (2020a: 3) underlines “we know very little about Turkey’s recent history,” and while “issues surrounding the recent past are at the very center of collective memories in today’s Turkey [. . .] a cohesive analysis of this period is still strikingly absent in scholarly works.” Regarding the historical analysis of the sixties and the seventies, there have been some comprehensive and multifaceted studies on the period (Barbaros and Zürcher, 2013, 2014; Kaynar, 2017a, 2020; Pekesen, 2020c), although more academic attention is undoubtedly needed. On the other hand, some elements of the recent past that have been still vivid in communicative memory were mediated in various ways. Military coup-related artistic productions are notable among these due to the widespread social trauma they caused, and the role of these products as memory carriers is of great interest to researchers. Especially in the literary field, coup-related traumas were mediated in several memoirs and fictional works under the name of “12 March” and “12 September” novels, written after the 1971 and the 1980 military coups (Alver, 2012; Belge, 1976; Çalışkan and Günay-Erkol, 2016; Günay-Erkol, 2011; Türkeş, 2000). Similarly, the cinematic depiction of coups has been a subject of interest for many directors and a wide variety of works have been produced in this field. Especially the 1980 military coup, a turning point in Turkey’s history, is widely memorialized through cinema (Başcı, 2017; Maktav, 2000a, 2000b; Tekin, 2013). The media, in general terms, are far from being passive and transparent transmitters of information, “rather they” play an active role in shaping our understanding of the past, “mediating” between us (as readers, viewers, listeners) and past experiences, and thus setting the agenda for future acts of remembrance within society (Erll and Rigney, 2009: 3). Above all, in a context like Turkey, where official memory has long ignored many narratives about the coup, mediation of memories through literature, film, and TV series has played a significant role in the creation, transmission, and preservation of social memory. However, aside from some notable works (Houston, 2020; Karacan, 2015; Orhon, 2015), scholarly analysis of coup memories that simultaneously address individual and collective levels certainly requires more attention.

Admittedly, academic and non-academic studies of the period mainly focus on the experience and memory of the left. This tendency primarily stems from the fact that the essential response of the left, which came out with a heavy defeat from the 1980 coup, “did not take the form of political action but of memory” (Pekesen, 2020b: 491). Beginning with the March 12 and September 12 literature, the experience and memory of the left were remediated through cultural representations, resulting in a kind of “leftist memory boom,” as Pekesen (2020b) emphasizes. It is worth noting that among those representations, TV series were particularly striking in terms of appealing to the outside of the leftist community as well. These series, broadcast in prime time on national channels, reached a wide audience by utilizing TV’s potential as a memory space enabling the development of social memory and confrontation with the past (Çelenk-Özen, 2010). “Offering telecinematic intersections between the personal and national, and between group and official ‘records’ of history” (Başcı, 2017: 10), they let the long sixties generation members remember and reinterpret the recent past that official memory wishes to be forgotten, in line with what Connerton (2008) describes as “repressive forgetting.” These mediated memories, therefore, also functioned as a counter-memory that challenges and resists the forgetting. In addition, they acted as a mediator through which the experiences that persisted in communicative memory were transmitted to succeeding generations. Yet, I want to draw attention to two responses to these serials. The first of these was made by the then Chief of General Staff, who was alarmed by the depictions of torture and accused one of the TV series of making unbalanced and illogical claims. It is, however, well known that those detained during the military regime, particularly the leftists, were severely tortured. While some people were killed during torture, survivors and their families still deal with the abuse’s long-term physical and mental effects (Can, 2016; Zeydanlıoğlu, 2009).

The second reaction came from the right-wing generation of the period, which consisted primarily of the so-called “Ülkücü,” radical nationalist youth with close ties to the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). They complained that while the leftist youth were portrayed as endearing, self-reliant, patriotic, unarmed, and good family children, nationalist youth were portrayed as brutish, rude, and ugly types with guns in the TV serials that have recently aired on TV (Tokay, 2010). Actually, the rightist in question here emerged mainly as an ultranationalist paramilitary organization taking power from the anti-communist campaign and violence. During the 1960–1980 period, this youth group was initially able to grow without interference, as they were considered to help suppress the leftists on the streets and in universities (Ağaoğulları, 1987: 192). In a way, they served as “auxiliary forces of the state” (Birikim, 1980, cited in Ağaoğulları, 1987: 192). It is thus understandable to some extent that the counter-memory, which offers an alternative to the national records and narratives, does not sympathize with the right in memorializing the period and the coup.

Nevertheless, the memory of the period and the coup is as varied as its participants (Pekesen, 2020b: 493) and it is also necessary to consider the accounts and testimonies of former right-wingers to conduct a thorough analysis of the past. ² A rightist film director, Nazif Tunç, says, on the representation of right-wingers in cultural products, “We are to blame. We shouldn’t blame those who show the Ülkücüs as murderers. How can we fix this? By making movies, by showing the truth” (Tokay, 2010). Indeed, they did so with The Cage, the first right-wing perspective film about the events leading up to the 1980 military coup, released in 2015. Yet, it has failed to reach a broad audience. Luckily, there has recently been a growing interest among right-wing youth of the time to tell their memories and perspectives (Şensönmez, 2022; Ugur-Cinar and Şensönmez, 2022). Their testimonies and experiences definitely need further scholarly analysis. As Bull and Hansen (2016: 10) suggested with “agonistic” memory, stepping out of the dichotomy of good and evil and creating a relation to “remember the past by relying on the testimonies of both perpetrators and victims, as well as witnesses, bystanders, spies and traitors,” are needed to understand this period thoroughly.

Returning to Pekesen’s (2020a) point that a comprehensive analysis of Turkey’s recent history is lacking, I believe that one of the ways to fill this gap is to focus on the lived experiences and memories of as many individuals as possible. In this way, it would be possible to see how singular lived experiences of historical events or periods differ and cross paths at some points and to see their place within the collective. As Halbwachs (1980: 44) states, there are always traces of the intersection of the collective influences in individual memory, although those influences inevitably have different dimensions for each social group and individual. Therefore, understanding the subjective interpretations of the individuals can be helpful to see intersection moments and their interactions and make multiple perspectives on collective memory visible. Such an approach will eventually lead us toward a detailed analysis. In what follows, rather than political activists, I will try to create a space for the “other” members of the generation who were mostly left out in the period’s narrative.

Social transformation, utopia, and violence: memories of the long sixties

Remembering the possibilities and coups d’état

The generational “magnetic field” (Wohl, 1979), which comes into existence through the experience of a historical event or events, has the power to create an attraction toward itself, placing individuals and groups within a social–cultural framework. Major historical events (war, genocide, famine, epidemics, revolutions, military coups, etc.) correspond to thresholds that define the boundaries of this frame (Wohl, 1979: 210). This is evident in the reflections of retired lecturer Hüseyin (b.1944), ³ who describes their generation as one marked by hardship:

Our generation is actually a generation of suffering. If you ask why, we were born on the eve of World War II. We grew up in poverty of that time. Then we lived through three juntas in our country. Four if you count this one. ⁴ And we haven’t lived a peaceful, happy, politically comfortable life. This is a bad thing.

Just as the life experiences of people who share the same chronological phase are distinctively common, their cultural and social responses to this experience will also have differentiating characteristics from previous and subsequent periods (Corsten, 1999; Edmunds and Turner, 2002; Mannheim, 1952; Schuman and Scott, 1989). In this respect, along with social movements, it was primarily the military coups that drew the framework of the social experience of the sixties and seventies in Turkey and affected the lives of all members of the generation simultaneously. Therefore, when asked how they remember this period, the respondents, particularly those in the gray zones, always first mentioned the coups. Even though they were the determining significant events of the period, the fact that a new coup attempt took place in 2016, just before the 2017–2018 period when the interviews took place, may also be a factor in their remembering the past primarily through coups. After all, “remembering needs occasions and it is selective by necessity” (Schmidt, 2008: 193). Among the three coups of the 1960–1980 period, it was the 1971 intervention that was most often recalled by the leftists as the primary victim of its aftermath. Regardless of their political beliefs, all respondents remembered the 1980 coup as a time of fear and destruction, while memories of the 1960 coup were contradictory.

The May 27, 1960 military coup, indeed, was greeted by the anti-DP public, authors, artists, academics. and journalists with joy, or at least a cautious welcome. The coup was widely believed to have put an end to the increasingly authoritarian DP government and emancipated the country, and it was this joy that was Mustafa’s (b.1949) most distinct memory of the coup. Mustafa, a republican ⁵ and retired dentist living in Ankara, was born to parents who were both CHP ⁶ voters and was 11 years old at the time of the coup, saying “We were thankful for the revolution of 1960 because we were saved.” Undoubtedly, this childhood memory reflected the family’s reaction, converted into a personal narrative, given that a child’s mind cannot fully comprehend what it means to be “saved” or the details of the political context. Halbwachs (1980: 60–61) argued that such historical occurrences coincide with commonly discussed family issues and that the child retains the family’s assessment. Furthermore, the discourse of emancipation prominently influenced public opinion throughout the period. As a result, this childhood memory is deeply intertwined with both familial and social memories. The same joy was expressed by retired civil servant Muhlis (b.1953), who was a child at the time of the May 27 coup, living in a remote area outside Kayseri, Central Anatolia:

I was a child at the time of the 1960 revolution. The notables in our village, including my father, were all CHP voters. Uncle Osman must have been a little more excited, as he organized a celebration in the village after the revolution. A bus full of people arrived in the square. They were playing drums and zurna on top of the bus. Youngsters waved Turkish flags [. . .] They served there, and people made speeches. I will never forget that celebration.

As can be seen in the narratives of Mustafa and Muhlis, and many others here, the coups were referred to as a “revolution,” reflecting the prevailing discourse popularized by the army and media in the past. In this way, military coups targeting the democratic process were promoted as a continuation or protector of Atatürk’s revolutions, and were thus legitimized. This was not just the case in Turkey, but “in many countries, including Greece in 1967,” mentions Christofis (2021: 124), “coups d’état were badged as ‘revolutions’ in an attempt to legitimize military action.” Today, while all coups are correctly named in the dominant discourse, some generation members still talk occasionally of a revolution.

The coup, however, did not bring emancipation for everyone. The daughter of a former DP bureaucrat family, Seher (b.1950), a right-wing housewife from Ankara despite her education in architecture and music, offers radically different assessments:

We did not like the [coup] at all. We had met Adnan Menderes previously through my aunt. Cemal Göktan, the then Governor of Ankara, was the son of my mother’s uncle. Of course, he was one of those who were imprisoned. We were not pleased, but our street in Izmir rioted. Everyone was out on the streets. Selim Akiş, a former [DP] deputy, used to live there. Only they never opened their doors or windows, and we never expressed joy.

The DP supporters’ perspectives do not figure much in the memory of this coup indeed. In addition, the coup d’etat of May 27, 1960 does not have many mnemonic representations. For example, it did not leave a significant number of testimonial novels behind, as in the novels of March 12 and September 12, and the few existing examples were written many years after the coup (Çalışkan and Günay-Erkol, 2016: 15). This was also because, unlike other coups, the 1960 coup was directed only against the DP’s political elites, and thus affected a small group and resulted with the execution of the prime minister and two other ministers. This event, leaving the first black mark in Turkey’s history of democracy, was long ignored. It was only in 1990 that the Turkish Grand National Assembly issued a law that returned their reputation to them, and their bodies were placed in a monumental grave. Furthermore, in recent years this coup has gained more importance in official memory. AKP government, holding the legacy of DP and thus giving great importance to the memorialization of the 1960 coup, transformed Yassıada Island, where three politicians were tried and sentenced to death, into a site of memory in 2020, renaming it as Democracy and Freedom Island. The island was reorganized by constructing an open-air museum, a convention center, and a luxurious hotel. Yet, this spatial transformation process, which seriously damaged the natural and archeological structure of the island, a conservation area, was carried out despite the objections of experts. According to Bezirgan-Tanış (2022: 179), the island, transformed by the initiatives of the ruling government, demonstrates the political roles attributed to places of memory and exhibits “an example of an intervention that is not only a project made possible by economic capital but also feeds on symbolic capital that contributes to the reproduction of power and privilege.”

Another determining factor in the memory of the 1960–1980 period was the promulgation of the 1961 Constitution, established after the May 27 coup, and the diversification of social life with the “relative” freedoms it guaranteed. The Constitution contributed to the political spirit of the era by designating the Turkish Republic as a “social state,” granting citizens social rights, broadening university autonomy, giving students the freedom of association, expanding union rights, and establishing the right to strike for employees (Ahmad, 2003: 122–123). Consequently, it is widely regarded as Turkey’s most progressive and “relatively” liberal constitution. Seher (b.1950), while dissatisfied with the impact of the 1960 military takeover on her family and acquaintances, believed the Junta’s Constitution to be better than the current one: “The 61 Constitution was a fine one, but it was never implemented. It allowed for some leeway. It was a Constitution that paved the way for labor unions to emerge.” In addition, she said, “if we had been governed” with the 1961 Constitution, “in my humble opinion, there would not be an Erdoğan today.” Semra, a leftist housewife, on the other hand, pointed out Turkey’s future constitutional needs, saying,

That constitution woke up Turkey, but it was taken back from us by force. Now the September 12 Law [1982 Constitution] is in force. It is a freak. Today we need to get rid of it and have an improved version of the 1961 Constitution.

Relatedly, Özbudun (2011: 44) states that because of the mentality of the statist-authoritarian, “the approach of the 1982 Constitution to fundamental rights and liberties is much more restrictive and authoritarian compared with that of its predecessor” and instead of defending individual liberties from state intrusion, “the new Constitution’s main goal was to protect the state from the actions of its citizens.” Discourses about amending the 1982 Constitution remain on the agenda, but the democratic processes to achieve this have not yet been realized. However, despite its many shortcomings, it is clear that the 1961 Constitution, which offered a “relatively” freer legal ground compared to the 1982 Constitution, also provided a legal basis for the utopian attitude of the long sixties, which witnessed the emergence of a unique generation.

The intersection of self-awareness, political consciousness, and collective identity

Our social environment has an inextricable link to how we recall the past at the individual and collective levels. In other words, memory is intersubjective and dialogic. It is shaped by the constant interaction of the personal and social domains (Radstone, 2000: 12). That is, we remember personal experiences within social and temporal settings. While recalling a memory from our past, we concurrently remember places, people we interacted with, and “social entities or structures” associated with that experience; in fact, “even the very act of self-consciousness is far from being isolated from society” (Funkenstein, 1993: 4). Ali’s (b.1944) recollection of the sixties below can serve as a good example of how an individual develops a self-awareness about herself/himself and the collectivity around her/him in constant interaction with the temporal and social context.

The sixties were eccentric; it was my rebellious period. I was against authority; my father was a soldier, so I was against the military; I was against everything. In the sixties, I had a classmate called Salih attending theater classes at the People’s House. One day, he came to me at a time when I was idler and said “We are rehearsing a play, can you play a role?” I said “I will,” as there were girls there. The play was Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Dead without Burial.” Again, opposing authority . . . I remember the first line: “Will you always be silent like that? Will you never speak?” We had a director called Vahit—communist Vahit—who had leftist ideals. Then, we played “Victory Medal” and then Turgut Özakman’s “Oven.” With the Oven, we participated in the METU theater competition. It was undercover at the time, the times when Deniz Gezmiş lived.

Ali, who endured these unprecedented times in Giresun—a small city on the Black Sea coast—narrated his own experiences, providing us insight into the spirit of the time. He painted a picture of a young generation of people in the sixties with a common compulsion to resist the paternal figure, the military, and so on, like elsewhere in the world, resisting authority and seeking a culture different from that of their parents, pursuing social and political ideals (Agar, 2008; Gildea, 2013; Gildea et al., 2013; Jian et al., 2018; Pensado, 2013; Ross, 2008; Rowbotham, 2001). All the plays he mentioned had special meaning for the socialist movement of the period when theater was highly influential. Ali’s narrative also included Deniz Gezmiş, the most famous student leader, who was executed in 1972, and Middle East Technical University (METU), a prominent university that took a central position in the student movements of the time. Ali, however, began a career as a police officer in 1969 under pressure from his father, becoming one of the guardians of authority: “My father said, ‘go be a cop rather than just wandering around.’ I was extremely upset and objected, though I did not believe they would accept me as a policeman.” Still, he said he became more comfortable in time, doing his best to protect the left-wing youth from the state violence of the seventies as a member of POL-DER (a leftist police association of the time calling themselves “the people’s police”). In this sense, Ali’s narrative offers the opportunity to understand not only how he makes sense of and reinterprets his past, but also how he relates to the collectivity, and through which stages he passes. This opportunity also offers a chance to understand the period beyond the studies based on macro-sociological terms, as shown with different cases in the comprehensive work titled Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt, an outcome of an extensive oral history project across Europe (Gildea and Mark, 2013: 14).

The sixties were the rebellious years not only for Ali but for countless young people globally. As in everywhere, in the late sixties, the young university denizens in Turkey began associating themselves with the global ‘68 movement and emerged as a new social group. However, although it had similar moments, Turkey’s ‘68 differed from its European counterparts on the ideological level. It can be seen, for example, in the words of Kürşat Bumin (1998)—a ‘68er writer and a journalist:

While they dealt the heaviest blow to Stalinism, we were just beginning to understand what a supreme institution the Party was. While Leninism was being written off in the West, we were looking for the answer to “what to do” in handbooks. While the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August ‘68 left Soviet totalitarianism alone, we were looking for ways to make this “intervention” meaningful.

So indeed, elsewhere, people were discussing their “concern about a political revulsion against Stalinism” (Rowbotham, 2001: 14). The young university population in Turkey, however, began to develop their own ideological perspectives and criticize the conditions of their own social group, taking global ideas and transposing them into their own social fissures. Still, they were on the same page as their contemporaries in organizing boycotts and occupations. Fuat (b.1946), a retired Kemalist teacher who studied geography at Istanbul University where there was no compulsory attendance, and who was thus able to simultaneously work as a teacher in a rural setting, while attending the university for final exams, joined one such boycott, describing it as follows:

Towards the summer vacation, a student uprising began. Our friends took over the administration and we did not attend classes. I don’t remember how the dean left, but in the dean’s building there was a cloakroom that we took over. Then we went up to the floor of the dean’s offices. In those days, [there were] magneto phones, naturally. We entered the dean’s office. One of our friends was sitting in the dean’s chair and showed off on the magneto phone. He dialed the post office and said “please connect me to De Gaulle.” De Gaulle was the President of France at that time. I never forget that joke.

In France, it was precisely in the last week of May 1968, on May 30, that de Gaulle threatened massive state violence and military intervention against the student protests, which he described as a potential “communist dictatorship” (Ross, 2008: 65), and this echoed on the globe. Hence, it was not only in France that De Gaulle’s name resonated as a figure to be overthrown or ridiculed. Fuat was far from being a prominent activist in social movements, but occasionally, he participated in events such as the one above. Yet, what is unforgettable here is the excitement of being a part of the collective global moment. As Pensado (2013: 4) underlines, “the political activism of the era did not take place in a vacuum”; there was international dialogue and interaction. Also, in Turkey, “the fast acquisition of knowledge through the media—newspapers, magazines, and by then available ‘classics’ of Marxism–Leninism—created a new political language that appealed to the youth” (Pekesen, 2020b: 481) and contributed to the interaction and hence to the formation of the collective. For example, Hüseyin (b.1944), who had just started teaching in 1967, explained how he joined the struggle, compelled by the books he read and the teacher group of which he was a member:

I was suddenly politicized in those years, and started reading [books]. The teachers at the school had a passion for reading, and I joined them, becoming a member of the Turkish Syndicate of Teachers (TÖS). I was then on my way to socialism.

What he narrates here is “a story of transformation—from private life to political life, and from individual concerns to a collective project” (Clifford et al., 1968: 21) as elsewhere on the globe. For Hüseyin, who came from a disadvantaged family, changing the world he lived in and making it a better place were a significant purpose, both individually and collectively. And this purpose was shared by many and created a “protest cycle” (Alper, 2010). Furthermore, the success of the organized and stable student protests had a domino effect, leading to the mobilization of other social groups (Alper, 2010: 85). Workers who had never gained success from strikes started to occupy their factories, and the peasants began occupying the fields (Mater, 2009: 297–298). Day by day, the social struggle grew, and the political milieu expanded and started to spread to the streets. For Sevim (b. 1947), however, a housewife who was just a bystander to all that was going on, “there was always an uproar on the streets” in Ankara, and this sometimes made her afraid to go out.

However, after the Turkish Labor Party, which attracted the votes of young people and workers with a curiosity for socialism, lost its representatives in Parliament in the 1969 elections, the general situation became more challenging. Hence the uproar that frightened Sevim transformed into something more intense and violent. In those years, when extra-parliamentary opposition dominated the youth movement, the presence and struggle of revolutionary and socialist organizations in politics became more visible, and conflict between the left and right became more intense in the streets (Landau, 2016: 38). The March 12, 1971 coup, however, brought a temporary halt to this conflict. Zeki (b.1951), a leftist student at Ankara Gazi Education Institute, stated: “After March 12, they arrested many students. They arrested a very good friend of mine in the Turkish Language Department. They arrested prominent and well-known revolutionaries in Gazi and imprisoned them for 6-7 months.” For Zeki, this was not the first moment his friends and himself were detained. But in the arrests that followed the coup, abuse was widespread, and for a while, it took the breath away from the leftist youth and broke their power. In other words, it was the first watershed moment for leftists; the second one, the 1980 coup, would be a total disaster.

Among those arrested were many journalists, writers, and academics, and several students were killed in the clashes that continued for 2 years in the aftermath of March 12. The prison experiences of the detainees led to the emergence of the March 12 novels that I mentioned earlier. Furthermore, fugitive student leaders Deniz Gezmiş, Yusuf Aslan, and Hüseyin İnan were captured and executed in 1972. However, these figures today have an important place in the collective memories as a symbol of resistance. They represent what Rigney (2018) refers to as the “memory–activism nexus” or “remembering hope.” For example, during the Gezi Park protests in 2013 against the authoritarian AKP rule, a huge poster of Gezmiş was hung on the wall of Atatürk Cultural Center in Taksim, Istanbul, symbolizing “the continuity of the Gezi Park protests with the history of resistance in Turkey” (Lüküslü, 2018). This pursuit of continuity or holding on to past possibilities and hopes pointed to memory–activism as “a vortex of recycling, recollection and political action that can be summed up as ‘civic memory’” (Rigney, 2018: 372). In this sense, the form of experience that is alive in the communicative memory of the leftists has been transferred to the next generation and has been used by recycling and recollection. Yet, it was not only the utopian attitude that defined the long sixties. This period was also one of the most intense times of political violence.

Memories of fragmentation, fear, and violence

Although the conflict and violence seemed to subside after the March 12 military coup, a second phase began following the release of the detained students under the 1974 General Amnesty, leading to a new wave of politically active students. The conflicts in the universities spread to high schools in the seventies (Mardin, 1978: 231), and there were serious clashes in the streets. A fine line could be drawn between the emotional climates of the sixties and seventies, especially for bystanders. For example, Mustafa (b.1949), a republican, who was generally away from politics of the era, had a great time in high school in the late sixties, but complained about the lack of enjoyment in his university years in the early seventies due to martial law and curfews. Mustafa’s “lack of sparkle” was common among his peers. Likewise, Nesrin (b.1944), a left-wing teacher at the time, in her comparison of the seventies with her years in Elazıg, a city in Eastern Anatolia, in the sixties, said:

I think the sixties were better than the seventies and eighties. In the sixties in Elazig, I would go to the movies with my boyfriends, go out to eat, and take a ride at night. All theater troupes would visit Elazig, Devekusu Cabaret, etc., it was amazing. There were three or four good movie theaters showing good movies. There were a few bookstores where left-wing books were available [. . .] At that time, no one commented on which newspaper you bought, although the caretaker of our apartment threatened us in 79–80 because we read the Cumhuriyet newspaper.

Nesrin’s comparison of Elazıg draws a line between the sixties and seventies but also points to the changes in today’s cultural and social conditions, which were gradually brought about after the 1980 coup. The daily life she describes in Elazıg is indeed “amazing” even from today’s perspective. Similar to the sixties, the main event of the early seventies was the military coup and the execution of three left-wing students. While March 12, 1971 had little bearing on those not directly involved in politics, the execution of these young people was devastating for various social groups. For example, commenting on the attire of the young left-wing people, Seher, a right-winger, stated that she did not like “the parkas” at all, and said: “The Deniz Gezmiş incident happened, and we all cried on the day he was hanged. Although we disagreed with his opinions, we all cried [because] that boy did nothing.”

Along with these three leftist young men, the executions of three right-wing politicians right after the 1960 coup d’état hold significant prominence in Turkey’s collective memory. Yet, the political violence of the period was not limited to the violent acts of military regimes. The civil war-like armed conflicts between radical left and right factions, coupled with instances of police violence and assassinations, constituted additional forms of political violence during Turkey’s period of upheaval long sixties, profoundly impacting the members of the generation. Hence, when interviewees were prompted to reflect on this era, it became evident that both the utopian ideals of the time and the atmosphere of violence and conflict have left an enduring mark on their memories. However, a distinct contrast emerges regarding perceptions of the period’s violence between activist members and “others” of the generation. While activist members center their narratives on their involvement in revolutionary struggles and various actions, the “others” primarily associate particularly the late seventies with disruption, fear, and violence. This is because, despite sharing the same temporal and historical conditions, each individual’s experience and memory differ. Put differently, as in Halbwachs’ (1980: 48) words, “each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory.” As diverse as the number of social groups, collective memory is “far from monolithic” (Olick, 2008: 159). Besides, it should be noted that, while violence undoubtedly played a significant role during this period in Turkey, the memory politics of the post-September 12 governments also played a part in emphasizing violent events over utopian ideals in collective memory, making the memories of violence more prominent in the narratives of the interviewees. Nevertheless, this period was a challenging one, characterized by short-lived coalition governments and economic crises, as well as increasing violence. It is no surprise, therefore, that those who were in the gray zones remembered the seventies as especially tough years, like Ercan (b.1950), a young right-leaning police officer at the time:

The seventies were the most painful years in Turkey. As far as I remember, the country did not experience a good year or a half year. The government changed every year or two. It was the most painful political and social period. The seventies broke people; deaths were common; and people were killed at the bus stop, on their doorsteps and in their homes. There were student protests every day. Workers, too, although, like the students, they were divided. People working in the same office started to look at each other differently.

Stressing the political division and violence of the time, Seher (b.1950) stated that they “experienced not so easy days” and said, “between ‘70 and ‘80, certain roads were the territory of the right or left; it was a disaster.” Similarly, Nesrin (b.1944), a leftist on her own, remembered those years with its violent environment, saying, “I would say I hated the seventies. The seventies were a nightmare for me, the worst years” and continued:

[My son] was 5–6 years old, [my daughter] was a baby. My parents lived in Esat [neighborhood]. On Saturdays, my husband would visit his parents, and I visited mine. It was a ritual. I was careful not to be late, but sometimes my mom would say, “eat dinner before you go.” The MHP supporters were dominant at the sixth stop, and I had to get off [the bus] there to take a single bus from Esat. I would [fearfully] get off the bus, tugging on [my son’s] arm, and [my daughter] would be in my arms. I would breathe a sigh of relief when I arrived at the other street. After 100 steps, I would enter our neighborhood, but I could not even walk straight. Every night [. . .], there was constant gunfire. [My son] could not sleep; he used to tell me, “Mommy, I cannot sleep” [. . .] Then in the seventies, the soldiers would search our homes; we were under incredible pressure.

As related by Nesrin and Seher, the domination of neighborhoods by either right- or left-wing groups was common in those years. It was not easy for people whose clothing, hair, or beard styles reflected their political views to pass through locations dominated by the opposite camp. The increasingly violent atmosphere in the late seventies ended with the coup d’état of 12 September 1980, led by Chief of General Staff Kenan Evren, and was replaced by the violence of the military junta. Although the resulting atmosphere of fear created by the coup affected all, the end of street violence provided some relief. Fuat (b.1946), a Kemalist teacher, exiled to a remote village just before September 12, recalls the day:

I’ll never forget; I was in that village on September 12 [. . .] It was so scary, but at least the streets were safe. [Before,] we used to lock our doors well in the evening, and if the doorbell rang, we would duck. We had friends whose doors were bombed. People were shot in the street. After September 12, at least the streets were safe as the acts [of violence] immediately ended. Our lives were secure now. Children could go to school easily. [Previously] there had been unrest even in the schools, as the students were all political. We tried to protect the leftist students without attracting attention to them, but they were still under pressure outside school.

As his words indicate, the military coup brought fear, but it was believed that the street violence would subside as a result, and the escalation of the political violence before the September 12 coup ensured immediate social approval. “I was in a leftist group [in Ankara], but I wasn’t involved in the struggle,” said another interviewee, Hasan (b.1954), adding that he was initially happy with the coup, because “[before the coup] we did not know who would die next, or where or when in an ambush or shooting would take place”; but soon after “everything, everything came to an end with the declaration of Martial law. Strikes and boycotts were banned, movies, theaters, everything. Life was disciplined.”

As can be seen, interviewees’ “September 12” memories are consistently linked to the preceding violence, clearly marking a period characterized by division and fracture. Accordingly, a parallel narrative emerged that encompassed the pre- and post-September 12 periods, highlighting the previous violence and the uneasy yet non-violent atmosphere that followed. Street violence ended immediately after the coup, but the entire country was placed under siege. For months, house searches, checkpoints, and raids on “suspicious” locations persisted. According to Nebahat (b.1944), who was a republican away from politics in Samsun, a city in the Black Sea region, at that time, the smallest of acts was enough to attract the attention of the soldiers:

We didn’t leave the house for two days. Then, my mother-in-law called and told us what had happened to her. She used to pray at the window when she couldn’t sleep. That night, it was raining. She opened the window and stared at the troops who walking by, thinking to herself, “poor kids, they have to walk in the mud and rain.” In return, they wondered why this woman kept opening her window and came to search her residence in the early hours of the morning. You can’t imagine how conscientious my mother-in-law was. They completely destroyed her home. “Why are you doing this to me? I have a son your age, we have soldiers [in the family],” she reproached them, but it was all in vain.

Everyone was profoundly affected by the atmosphere of unease and fear, which started to spread in the second half of the 1970s and took on a new dimension with the last coup of the era, this one involving state violence. Malik (b. 1951), a conservative who was working as a highway worker in Istanbul at the time, was also aware of what was going on, even though he was outside the events:

There were very chaotic days; right-wing and left-wing were very chaotic. Everyone shot each other. Many things happened, I mean many things happened. But, of course, we were always outside of them. With the coup of September 12, 1980, there was a silence and many people were taken in. But they were subjected to various torments. Party leaders were also taken in.

Right after the coup, security forces launched a massive wave of arrests. Many people were arrested, not only members of radical groups but also ones who were just dissidents. Ali (b.1944), a leftist police officer in Istanbul back then, stated that the National Intelligence Agency produced detention lists that were given to the police department, and a large-scale hunt was launched. Another police officer, Ercan (b.1950), a right-leaning, said that they had difficulty reviewing the criminal records of those on the list and determining which ones to detain: “Our minds constantly wavered between our conscience and martial law.” Ercan was one of the agents who took part in the detention of several persons. As a police officer, he was an aide and had to do what was ordered. But, he, probably like many others, made a conscientious judgment in the face of his orders and developed a strategy of being careful to exclude at least those with no criminal record whatsoever from the list. Because anyone who was detained at one time or another was subject to severe abuse, and he was well aware of that. Put differently, in line with Agamben’s (1998) perspective, the September 12 regime represented a domain of sovereignty where torture, murder, and disappearances were legitimized, and the bodies and lives of homines sacri were either captured or expelled. At the end of the day, 650,000 people were detained. Prosecutors demanded the death penalty for 7000 people, 517 were subsequently sentenced to death, and 50 were executed. Furthermore, 300 more people died under suspicious circumstances, and according to “official reports,” 171 died while being tortured. Some 14,000 were denaturalized, while 30,000 more fled abroad as political refugees. ⁷

Echoes of the time: a state of nostalgia and hope

All in all, the damage caused by September 12 was so deep that it affected even those who were distant from politics. In this sense, the chaos that preceded September 12, the stifling silence that followed, and the awareness of the state’s capacity for extreme cruelty—whether experienced personally or learned through the experiences of a relative, friend, or neighbor—marked a significant milestone for the entire society. The coup not only ended the conflict between radical groups but also brutally dismantled a significant social space for labor and civil rights movements. Besides, it wagged a big threatening finger at the majority outside this opposition sphere. The previous confrontational environment was so exhausting that the majority allowed the rights that had fostered the spirit of freedom since the 1961 Constitution to be rolled back in exchange for being able to go out on the streets freely. And an atmosphere of silence and forgetting followed. Muhlis, a republican and retired civil servant, says: “The youth of this country have paid a huge price. Many people disappeared and died. Lost years! I don’t want to remember.” However, choosing what to “remember” and what to “forget” is a highly politicized process (McGrattan and Hopkins, 2017: 492). Forgetting and remembering are just two sides of the same coin, and in fact, “in remembering, one faces the world; in forgetting, one faces oneself” (Esposito, 2008: 182). And instead of demanding confrontation and reckoning with the violence of the coup regime, the vast majority, like Muhlis, remained silent and refused to remember what happened.

However, it is necessary to confront the September 12 period and scholarly analyze the violent environment that preceded it, which frightened the majority into indirectly supporting the coup and afterward remaining silent. This can only be achieved by considering the perspectives of all period agents. In this respect, Bull and Hansen, relying on Mouffe and Bakhtin, suggest an “agonistic memory” approach that “should be reflexive in ways which not only expose its socially constructed nature and/or include the suffering of the ‘others’ but also through a dialogic approach which relies on a multiplicity of perspectives.” Only in this way will it be possible to draw lessons for the future from the experience of the past. Especially in a society like Turkey, which experienced multiple military interventions (including the last attempted military coup in 2016) and countless traumatic events, the way to build a better and fairer future is to learn from the past, taking all parties into account, and “not to judge absolute truth or even to sympathize with either but to learn from their experiences and perspectives” (Olick, 2007: 148). In this sense, I believe the perspective of the “others” in the gray area, which I have tried to address here, is also very important because they were the majority of the generation. Their experiences and fears had an impact on the political choices of later periods and even on shaping the political attitudes of successive generations.

With the September 12 fracture, the most distinctive times in Turkey’s history seem to have ended. However, pointing it as an end should not mean that pre-12 September times or the long sixties have been understood as a “closed episode” (Pekesen, 2020a: 2), because at least the utopian manner of the period has been rooted in the expectations. As mentioned before, Gezi Park protest was an example of “remembering hope” through political activism. Furthermore, the interviews show that although the violence and conflict climate of the period have been feared and hated most, the pursuit of democracy and hope for a more just society keeps waiting in the expectations. Therefore, narratives that encompass traumatic or conflicted experiences here also embrace hope, drawing lessons from the past. “Despite all these challenges,” says Muhlis (b.1953), “I know that there are people who think like me,” as he looks to the future with hope through his two children:

I hope they can do good and add goodness to this bad trend. I trust my children a lot [. . .]. Today, the negativities are more, but I hope they will be reversed. A poet says we will see the good days.

Indeed, the pursuit of a better society remains an ongoing expectation and has already been passed down to the next generation. Likewise, Bediha (b.1943) hopes against hope:

If the struggles we had in the past had continued, if rulers were people who loved their country and could appreciate how the country got to this day, Turkey would be five times more progressed. But if a government that believes in social democracy, equality and justice comes to power, we will be enlightened. We should. I am not hopeless. There is hope, but there must be governments and people who will bring hope to life.

The motif that emerges in most narratives, to put with Koselleck’s (2004: 260) terms, is the present that oscillates between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. The hope here is a state of expectancy directed to the present and the future by questioning the past. Although the narratives are filled with a spiral of violence, like a bitter taste in the mouth, one can also filter out from them the hope for a more just and truly democratic Turkey, which is more distant today compared to the pre-1980 era. Relatedly, despite the violence that marked the last phase of the 1960–1980 period, interviewees’ narratives about those years are highly nostalgic. Svetlana Boym (2001: 16) notes that in Europe, in most cases, revolutions were followed by outbursts of “political and cultural manifestations of longing.” Whether for a fallen empire or for violent but nonetheless more progressive times, the focus in these outbursts is the extent of social transformation, a significant differentiation of the past from the present.

In this respect, the conditions of 2017–2018, the years in which the interviews took place, are essential here as they lead to comparisons between the past and the present. For a generation that experienced the sixties and seventies, these years, in which the ruling AKP administration started to adopt a harsher and more authoritarian stance (Akçay, 2021; Erensü and Alemdaroğlu, 2018; Öztürk, 2019), correspond to a time when the expectations for the future were even more uncertain. Therefore, in parallel to the authoritarian and Islamist “new” Turkey that the government is trying to create, they long for the years before the 1980 military coup despite all challenges and still hope for a better society. As Boym (2001: 16) mentions, “nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective.”

The September 12 junta regime and subsequent governments have sought to establish a memory regime, selectively portraying the period from 1960 to 1980 solely as one of violence. In other words, they have attempted to ignore or even erase the pursuit of a democratic society fostered by the 1961 Constitution, along with the social and political experiences of that era (Bora, 2020: 9). However, the living memory of Turkey’s long sixties generation represents a “‘memorial resistance’ towards the more or less official interpretations of history” (Reulecke, 2008: 123).

Conclusion

This article attempted to present a pluralistic memory narrative of Turkey’s long sixties, a turbulent period when diverse social groups emerged as political subjects for the first time. During this era, new ideologies and social movements affected the entire society, leading to increased political determination. The 1961 Constitution and the global influences motivated youth activism regarding broader social problems. However, this trend eventually turned into an armed struggle and a widespread right–left conflict, culminating in violent state interventions following the September 12, 1980 coup. Turkey’s long sixties, thus, were the temporal home of a range of events, with social movements and coups framing the generation’s social experience and memories.

Each generation, however, also includes a sizable number of people who are distant, irrelevant, and unnoticed, so in this article, I have paid particular attention to understanding the overlooked lived experiences of the period. I have therefore tried to draw also on the memories of those on the “other” side of the generation—those with loose political ties. Although this period was mainly characterized by its utopian dreams, it also witnessed violent events increasing in its final years. These events caused fear and anxiety for the “other” members of the generation, leading to implicit consent to the September 12 coup d’état and their silence on the state violence that followed. Yet, the extent of social transformation since then has also turned them into nostalgic subjects longing for the utopian spirit of the period.

In this sense, for the scope of this study, it was crucial to include the perspectives of those on the periphery or outside the dominant narrative of Turkey’s long sixties, which is typically characterized by utopian leftist influences. This inclusion aims to contribute to a more agonistic memory narrative of the period, which needs to be broadened with further studies. Moreover, such an approach provides a unique opportunity to explore not only how different individuals reinterpret their personal histories, but also how they connect to the broader collective context and the stages of transformation they have undergone. On a broader level, this also offers a space to trace and discuss the interplay between different levels of memory.