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LILO LINKE: A STORYTELLER OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN TURKEY
Anita OĞURLU *
This is the story of a pauperized non‐Jewish German woman from east Berlin, Lilo Linke (1906‐
1963) who might have been a prototype citizen for Hitler’s Germany, but instead, through “fortune
encounters” and lived experiences Erfahren, metamorphosed into a writer and progenitor of social
justice. The central focus of my thesis is the following question: What changed her? My question is
similar to that of Norwegian‐American sociologist‐economist Thorstein Veblen when he asked in
1899: 1 Why do human beings who work with purposeful intent for the common good evolve into
coercive self‐centric agents to inhibit human good? Twisting the question around then, how did Linke
metamorphose from a self‐centric individual to a purposeful human being to work for the betterment
of the whole? How did experiences, inclusive of those lived in other geographies and cultures, help
Linke “unlearn” or come to question what she had “learned” in educational, economic, media,
religious and legal institutions in Weimar? What role did “fortunate encounter(s)” play in this
process?
Goethe believed his “fortunate encounter” with Schiller led to a “purer, freer state of selfawareness
[...] the energetic leap which takes us to a higher level of understanding.” 2 Goethe
criticized scientists in his day as collectors not generators of knowledge. They merely used knowledge
for domination and control. Instead, he offered an alternative scientific method he called Zarte
Empirie. “There is a delicate empiricism which makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby
becoming true theory.” 3 “Delicate empiricism” requires “lively intellect” over theoretical ideas alone.
For Goethe there is “seeing and seeing.” 4 His delicate empiricism employed intuitive perception,
perceptive imagination and synthesis. First, intuitive perception perceives a part within a whole and
whole within a part, similar to the act of inhaling and exhaling, each bound to the other. Second,
knowledge requires faculties of perceptive imagination, observations and experiences which also
draw from memory but are grounded in real life and not imagined, requiring interlocking experiences
of reciprocal exchange with other minds and bodies. Third, experiences, in Linke’s case, gathered
across cultures and geographies intersect to form a rational synthesis. Synthesis for Goethe is the
ability to really see, and in so doing, bring about possibilities for endless development. Linke, I
suggest, came to learn by way of “fortunate encounters” using Goethe’s “delicate empiricism” as her
praxis although it is not known that she was familiar with his concepts.
Born into a working class family in east Berlin and with little formal education beyond Gymnasium,
Linke’s chance to flourish was severely curtailed by overwhelming social turmoil. She experienced
WWI, the November Revolution, Weimar Inflation, European fascism, rising Nazism in Germany,
WWII, the Ecuadorian–Peruvian War and Ecuador’s right‐wing governance under President Valesco
Ibarra. With little choice but to survive in a highly fractured society where institutions, mass media
and what she called “war school” all supported war, Linke also witnessed the German Worker’s
Councils, bolstered by the Bolshevik revolution, hold strikes and mass protests in her streets of east
Berlin. According to her mother, Russians, the French, Jews and socialists were their enemies. At
twenty‐eight, Linke wrote her German experiences from a naïve child’s point of view. Recollecting her
discovery of a dead man in the street, Linke questioned the experience:
My mother always said all the Spartacists were murderers. But he could not be one, he
had been murdered himself. [...] I was fond of workers and simple people. They were kind
and genuine and never fussy like old aunts and fine grown‐ups who always talked with
children as if they were half‐wits. I hated them. But I could not hate the workers. 5
While attending a summer school camp, Linke met her first “fortunate encounter” Anne, the
daughter of a scientist, a Bildungsbürgertum or higher bourgeoisie that valued education over pure
*
Humanities & Cultural Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London