Research Information System
The military coup of 12 September 1980 was one of the most radical moments of transformation in the history of contemporary Turkey. The coup aimed at annihilating the left-wing movement, which was then in its heyday, and took every effort to accomplish this. As a result, the 12 September was a traumatic experience for the generations who experienced it and for large segments of the society beyond. This article scrutinizes how the traumatic coup experience reveals itself as nostalgia in subsequent generations. By discussing the connection between trauma and nostalgia and clarifying the functions nostalgia fulfills in the face of trauma, the article contributes to the intricate debate on the nexus between these two concepts. It historicizes and contextualizes the memory of the coup, with a particular focus on how silence and lacunae characterize it, which significantly contributed to the emergence of nostalgia in subsequent generations by creating a sense of rupture. The article scrutinizes how "soothing and utopian images of the past" are manifested in the social and political imaginaries of the subsequent generations of left-wingers. How the periods before and after 12 September were constructed historically and how subsequent generations imagined the break between these two historical periods are questions directly related to the emergence of nostalgia. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with members of the subsequent generations, the nostalgia of 12 September is scrutinized with an analysis centered around how the 1970s were gloriously and epically grasped and, in connection with this, how a sense of political guilt was internalized by subsequent generations.
