Traugott Fuchs Archive and Book Collection
Traugott Fuchs (1906–1997), a German academic, artist, and translator, came to Turkey in 1934 and spent most of his life there. He taught German and French at Istanbul University and at Boğaziçi University / Robert College. During the Second World War, Fuchs was interned in Çorum and he transformed this period into a productive phase of observation and artistic creation, producing numerous works. After suffering a stroke in 1991, he spent his final years at the Saint George Austrian Hospital and passed away in 1997. In accordance with his will to make the archive accessible to researchers, the archive was transferred to the Orient-Institut Istanbul after the cataloguing work carried out at Boğaziçi University was completed (Schweissgut & Sivri, 2021). In 2024, a documentary film titled Traugott was produced based on the archive, focusing on Fuchs’s life story and intellectual world.
The archive consists of five series according to content and document types: Personal Papers, Works, Correspondence, Collection Materials, and Additional Documents. It is a comprehensive, multilingual, and interdisciplinary collection containing documents in Turkish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, comprising thousands of letters, diaries, a specialized library, and written sources such as unpublished translations as well as collage notebooks he created with clippings from the Günaydın newspaper, along with paintings and sketches.
Access to the Archive
The Traugott Fuchs Archive can be consulted via the online catalog system Kalliope-Verbund. Kalliope is a union catalog for collections consisting of personal papers, manuscripts, and publishers’ archives. The 13,927 items in the Fuchs Archive can be searched through hierarchical structures or by keyword; in addition, the network of relationships created through indexes and linked data can also be viewed on the platform. As the archive has not yet been fully digitized, digital copies of the materials are not available on the platform. Researchers must submit an application for use of the archive by contacting the head librarian (menz@oiist.org) with the materials they wish to consult. Access restrictions may be applied for legal reasons, physical preservation concerns, institutional requirements, or in cases where the consent of living persons is required.
Access to the Book Collection
The collection located under sub-series IV.1. Bibliothek within the Traugott Fuchs Archive is a specialized library consisting largely of works of German literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A significant portion of these books are core sources that Fuchs used in his teaching, and many volumes contain his handwritten notes and occasional sketches. These works are catalogued as a separate collection within the Orient-Institut Istanbul Library and can be searched through the library catalog under the shelf mark “F”. Researchers may request the relevant publications via email (oiibib@oiist.org). Of the approximately 1,000 volumes in the collection, cataloguing has been completed for 624 books, while work on the remaining part is ongoing.
Karin Schweissgut & Melissa Sivri. (2021) “Bir Yaşamın İzleri – Traugott Fuchs Mirasının Kataloglanması”. https://oiist.org/tr/bir-yasamin-izleri-traugott-fuchs-mirasinin-kataloglanmasi/
Zehra Özbay
Orient – Institut Istanbul
Librarian
