Traugott Fuchs belonged to the circle of the Jewish Romance scholar Leo Spitzer, under whom he had studied and whose assistant he became in 1930 at the Romance Department of the University of Cologne. After Hitler's assumption of power, when Spitzer was dismissed by the National Socialist regime, Fuchs started a solidarity action protesting against his dismissal and was consequently persecuted by other university members. Fuchs was not of Jewish origin, but out of political conviction and solidarity decided to follow his teacher Spitzer into exile in Istanbul in 1934.

There he first worked as a French teacher at the foreign language school at Istanbul University. Together with Spitzer, he then founded the German Department of the Faculty of Philosophy and taught German language and literature for almost half a century. Fuchs remained in Istanbul even after Spitzer took up a position in the United States and worked from that point on with Spitzer's successor, the exiled Romanist Erich Auerbach. Auerbach wrote his foundational work Mimesis during his years in Istanbul.

From 1943 to 1978 Traugott Fuchs also taught at Robert College (in 1971 it became Boğaziçi University) where in 1924 one of the Dimitri Ismailovitch’s exhibitions took place. Traugott Fuchs gave German language classes. Founded in 1863, the American College was initially a missionary educational institution based in Bebek on the Bosporus. Fuchs’ contract was renewed annually or every three years, and he became an “assistant professor” there in 1961 and a full-time teaching member of the faculty (doçent) in 1971. His students' enthusiasm for their lecturer continued even after they had graduated (see quotations from former students in Wiemers/Kalaycı 2007, 25).

In addition to his teaching activities, Traugott Fuchs developed a diverse academic, literary and artistic oeuvre. He wrote poems and elegies, worked on Rimbaud (Fuchs 1937) and, as one of the few German-speaking emigrants to learn the Turkish language, translated into German a number of Turkish literary works, such as the stories of the now-canonical modern Istanbul writer Sait Faik Abasıyanık (“Die Löffelinsel”). A self-taught artist, he also painted and drew. He left behind 200 paintings and several thousand works on paper. These include portraits, landscapes and flower paintings, as well as everyday scenes, and reveal a variety of artistic expressions that range from meticulous realism to a rather free style.
A small, undated watercolour drawing by Fuchs depicting a naked bather in the sea can be seen as being in a dialogue with a poem by the German Orientalist Hellmut Ritter, who lived in Istanbul from 1926 and enjoyed a long friendship with Fuchs. The poem, “Das Bad im Mittelmeer” (The Bath in the Mediterranean), reads: “A leap! The god disappears in the waves, / Poseidon's darling romps in the sea; / The brown arms' quick thrusts speed / The slender body back and forth in the water.” (Ritter 1969, 94f., own translation from German; see also Stauth 2011, 422).

In general, Traugott Fuchs can be seen as an important component in the various networks and literary relationships within the exile community. His correspondence with Erich Auerbach, Hellmut Ritter and the writer Hermann Hesse, who, like Fuchs, was also an an artistic talent, provides a revealing picture of life in an age under pressure. Fuchs was in touch with many German-speaking intellectuals and academics in Istanbul, such as the philologist Robert Anhegger, the art historian Ernst Diez and the biologist and photographer Leonore Kosswig.

Fuchs’ artistic work can likewise be used to examine the exceptional situation of exile. Interned for thirteen months in the Anatolian town of Çorum – in 1944, all German-speaking emigrants were interned in three Anatolian towns – Traugott Fuchs created a cycle of paintings (Çorum resimleri) dedicated to the landscape, people and experiences of internment (Fuchs 1986; Bilder der Sehnsucht 2001, 19). Always open to new techniques and materials, even as he grew older, in the 1970s and 1980s Fuchs produced the Günaydın notebooks, using newspaper cuttings from the Günaydın newspaper, which he collaged and wrote comments on, creating a subjective compendium of the socio-political and cultural contexts of the two decades (Schweißgut 2020).
Fuchs’s long list of residential addresses (compiled with information of his nephew Hermann Fuchs) illustrate the precarious life led many emigrants who lacked permanent employment. However, this was the exception in Istanbul, where most emigrants were required to have fixed contracts.

During the period immediately after his arrival in Istanbul in 1934, Fuchs lived with the philologists Hans Marchand and Heinz Anstock, both from Leo Spitzer’s circle, first in Bebek, then near Istanbul University. In 1938, he moved into a 19th century red yalı in Anadolu Hisari, on the Asian side of Istanbul. He was to draw this villa in a series of pictures that extended into the 1980s. In the early 1940s, Fuchs again lived in Bebek, a former fishing village where a number of emigrants had houses. He took up residence in a house opposite Arslan Konak, where Erich Auerbach resided. As already mentioned, between September 1944 and November 1945, Traugott Fuchs was interned in Çorum, Anatolia. After his return, he moved in with Hellmut Ritter in Bebek for a year (in the same neighbourhood as Leonore and Curt Kosswig), and in 1946 found accommodation in Ortaköy, close to the Ortaköy Mosque. In 1952 Fuchs moved into room 13 in Hamlin Hall in the grounds of Robert College (Bilder der Sehnsucht 2001, 35). From his window, he had a view of the Küçüksu valley. He sought new accommodation when the college became a Turkish state university, Boğaziçi University, in 1971 and moved to a private flat in Rumeli Hisar. In 1991, aged of 85, he was evicted from the flat and, after suffering a stroke, spent the last years of his life in Saint George Austrian Hospital in Beyoğlu. Traugott Fuchs was buried in the Protestant Istanbul cemetery Feriköy (Johnson/Wittmann 2020, 20).
His gravestone is decorated with the outline of the door of an old house in his internment village of Çorum, which he once painted. The name on the headstone is written in the form of his signature and the flowers represented are pansies, which Fuchs loved and frequently sketched (Fuchs 2021).