German activists projected an image of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wearing a Hitler mustache and Nazi armband onto the Turkish Embassy in Berlin on May 16, 2016, warning that Turkey was moving toward dictatorship two months before the July 15 coup attempt.
The words “He’s back” appeared beside the image in a reference to Adolf Hitler.
The protest was organized by Pixel Helper, a German art collective known for using projected images in political campaigns.
It came amid growing pressure on journalists and political critics in Turkey and 10 days after Cumhuriyet journalists Can Dündar and Erdem Gül received prison sentences for reporting on alleged arms shipments by Turkish intelligence to Syria.
Pixel Helper said Erdoğan’s attacks on press freedom and the imprisonment of journalists and politicians followed patterns Germans recognized from their own history.
“The similarities between the early Nazi regime and Erdoğan’s Turkey right now are frightening,” group member Oliver Bienkowski said.
“We fear that history is repeating itself, and he must be stopped before it is too late,” he added.
The projection invoked the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, which Hitler used to suspend civil liberties, arrest political opponents and accelerate the creation of a dictatorship.
Two months after the Berlin protest, Turkey experienced the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016.
Erdoğan’s government declared a nationwide state of emergency on July 20 and used emergency decrees to dismiss public employees, close institutions, seize assets and restructure the state.
The measures expanded far beyond those accused of taking part in the military uprising and helped lay the foundation for the executive presidency and one-man rule that followed.
Seen in that context, the image projected onto the Turkish Embassy stands as an early warning of the authoritarian system that emerged after July 15.
