Eastern Internationalism beyond borders? The anti-colonial printing of the Kaviani press in Weimar Berlin

My PhD project looks at the political activism of people from foremostly West Asia who, during the interwar period, used the services of the Persian Kaviani printing press in Berlin to circulate their printed goods. This printing press and publishing house, that had its offices in Berlin-Charlottenburg, after the First World War became famous for the distribution of multilingual anti-colonial periodicals and pamphlets, written and edited especially by Indians, Persians, Turks, Egyptians, Transjordanians, and Syrians, who had settled in Berlin.

I investigate this group of people, their ideas and thoughts through the lens of “Easternism”, as the expression of Eastern internationalist thinking was a central uniting factor among this very diverse group of anti-colonialists that included journalists, merchants, intellectuals and students. My dissertation project hence especially examines the transnational discourses on how to revive the “East” in the face of Western domination while likewise preserving the specificities of Eastern cultures and societies.

A large corpus of Kaviani-periodicals, memoirs, autobiographies, and archival records help me to examine the yet untold intellectual history of the Kaviani printing press and its large anti-colonial network in Weimar Berlin.

The research unites thus methods from the field of the history of books with elements from network studies and discourse analysis.

 

Hanna Janatka studied Islamic Studies and History in Berlin and Istanbul. From 2022 to 2023, she worked at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin.

First Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ulrike Freitag

Publications

Reviews

Hanna Janatka (2025) “O’Halloran, Erin M. B.: East of Empire. Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars”. H-Soz-Kult. 30.09.2025. https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-154831.

 

Blog entries

Janatka, Hanna (2025) “Nah/östlicher Antikolonialismus in französischen Archiven”. Dialog und Austausch [Blog of the German Historical Institute, Paris]. https://dhip.hypotheses.org/5426

 

Janatka, Hanna (2022) “Entwurf zur Masterarbeit ‚In politischen Fahrwassern - Stimmen von (tschechoslowakischen) MuslimInnen zum internationalen Kriegsgeschehen der 1940er Jahre. Eine historische Auseinandersetzung mit der Zeitschrift ‚Hlas‘ (1937 -1945)”. Paper for the 26. Münchner Bohemisten-Treffen, Exposé Nr. 12. https://www.collegium- carolinum.de/fileadmin/data_cc/Veranstaltungen/2022_Bohemistentreffen/12_Janatka_2022.pdf.

 

Presentations/ Talks

September 2025: Eastern Internationalism in Global Weimar, presentation at the Colloquium of the German Historical Institute, London.

 

May 2025: Eine „mahalla“ entlang der Spree: Räume des nah/östlichen Exils im Berlin der 1920er Jahre, presentation at Neuere Forschungen zum Exil. Workshop für Doktorierende, Zentrum für Exilforschung Frankfurt am Main.

November 2024: Eastern Internationalism in global Weimar through the lens of “al-Ḥamāma” (1923-1924), presentation on the 58th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (online), Panel “Traversing between East and West: The Arabic Periodical as Form”.

September 2024: “Āzādī-i sharq” (Freedom of the East) through industrial growth: Rethinking networks of anti-colonialism in global Weimar, presentation on the 12th International ESPRit Conference (Urbino, 2024): Periodicals: S.T.E.A.M. AHEAD!.

March 2022: In politischen Fahrwassern – Stimmen von (tschechoslowakischen) MuslimInnen zum internationalen Kriegsgeschehen der 1940er Jahre. Eine historische Auseinandersetzung mit der Zeitschrift „Hlas“ (1937 -1945), presentation on the 26. Münchner Bohemisten-Treffen(online).