04/08/2010
Demons of the Past
The Armenian Genocide and the Turks
By Benjamin Bidder, Daniel Steinvorth and Bernhard Zand
Photo Gallery: 3 Photos
AP/ Armenian National Archives
The month of April marks the 95th anniversary of the start of the
Armenian genocide. An unusual television documentary shows what
motivated the murderers and why Germany, and other countries, remained
silent.
Tigranui Asartyan will be 100 this week. She put away her knives and
forks two years ago, when she lost her sense of taste, and last year
she stopped wearing glasses, having lost her sight. She lives on the
seventh floor of a high-rise building in the Armenian capital Yerevan,
and she hasn’t left her room in months. She shivers as the cold
penetrates the gray wool blanket on her lap. "I’m waiting to die," she
says.
Ninety-two years ago, she was waiting in a village in on the Turkish
side of today’s border, hiding in the cellar of a house. The body of
an Armenian boy who had been beaten to death lay on the street. Women
were being raped in the house next door, and the eight-year-old girl
could hear them screaming. "There are good and bad Turks," she
says. The bad Turks beat the boy to death, while the good Turks helped
her and her family to flee behind withdrawing Russian troops.
Avadis Demirci, a farmer, is 97. If anyone in his country keeps
records on such things, he is probably the last Armenian in Turkey who
survived the genocide. Demirci looks out the window at the village of
Vakifli, where oleander bushes and tangerine trees are in full
bloom. The Mediterranean is visible down the mountain and in the
distance.
In July 1915, Turkish police units marched up to the village. "My
father strapped me to his back when we fled," says Demirci. "At least
that’s what my parents told me." Armed with hunting rifles and
pistols, the people from his and six other villages dug themselves in
on Musa Dagh, or Moses Mountain. Eighteen years later, Austrian writer
Franz Werfel described the villagers’ armed resistance against the
advancing soldiers in his novel "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh."
"The story is true," says Demirci. "I experienced it, even if I am
only familiar with it from the stories I was told."
Avoiding the Word
Aside from Werfel’s book — and the view, from the memorial on
Zizernakaberd hill near Yerevan, of the eternally snow-capped and
eternally inaccessible Mount Ararat — there are few reminders left of
the Armenian genocide as its last few survivors approached death.
Between 1915 and 1918, some 800,000 to 1.5 million people were
murdered in what is now eastern Turkey, or died on death marches in
the northern Syrian desert. It was one of the first genocides of the
20th century. Other genocides — against the European Jews, in
Cambodia and in Rwanda — have since taken their place in history
between the Armenian genocide and today.
The Armenian people, after suffering partial annihilation, then being
scattered around the world and forced back to a country that has
remained isolated to this day, have taken decades to come to terms
with their own catastrophe. It was only in the 1960s, after a long
debate with the leadership in Moscow, that the Armenians dared to
erect a memorial.
Turkey, on whose territory the crimes were committed, continues to
deny the actions of the Ottoman leadership. Germany, allied with the
Ottoman Empire in World War I, and the Soviet Union, well-disposed
toward the young Turkish republic, had no interest in publicizing the
genocide.
Germany has still not officially recognized the Armenian genocide. In
2005, the German parliament, the Bundestag, called upon Turkey to
acknowledge its "historical responsibility," but it avoided using word
"genocide."
Because of Ankara’s political and strategic importance in the Cold
War, its Western allies did not view a debate over the genocide as
opportune. And the relative lack of photographic and film material —
compared with the Holocaust and later genocides — has made it even
more difficult to examine and come to terms with the Armenian
catastrophe. "The development of modern media," says German
documentary filmmaker Eric Friedler ("The Silence of the Quandts"),
"arrived 20 years too late for the examination of this genocide."
But there are contemporary witnesses, Germans and Americans, in
particular, whose accounts and correspondence are preserved in
archives, where they have been studied mainly by specialists until
now. This Friday, to mark the 95th anniversary of the genocide,
Germany’s ARD television network will air the elaborately researched
documentary "Aghet" (Armenian for "Catastrophe"), which brings the
words of diplomats, engineers and missionaries to life.
An ensemble of 23 German actors narrates the original texts — not in
the style of a docu-drama, which re-enacts the events using
semi-fictional dialogue and historic costumers, but in simple
interviews that derive their effectiveness from the selection of texts
and the presentation rather than a dramatization of history.
First-Hand Documents
The first performer is actor and author Hanns Zischler, who starred in
director Wim Wenders’ 1976 film "Im Lauf der Zeit" (or "Kings of the
Road"). He reads the words of Leslie Davis, who, until 1917, was the
US consul in the eastern Anatolian city of Harput, where thousands of
Armenians were herded together and sent on a death march toward the
southeast. "On Saturday, June 28th," Davis wrote, "it was publicly
announced that all Armenians and Syrians [Assyrians of the Armenian
Apostolic faith] were to leave after five days. The full meaning of
such an order can scarcely be imagined by those who are not familiar
with the peculiar conditions of this isolated region. A massacre,
however horrible the word may sound, would be humane in comparison
with it."
Friedrich von Thun, a film and television actor who appeared in Steven
Spielberg’s film "Schindler’s List," plays US Ambassador Henry
Morgenthau. He describes encounters with Ottoman Interior Minister
Talaat Pasha, who, at the beginning of the operation, confronted
Morgenthau with the "irrevocable decision" to render the Armenians
"harmless."
After the genocide, Talaat summoned the US ambassador again and made a
request that Morgenthau said was "perhaps the most astonishing thing I
had ever heard." Talaat wanted the lists of Armenian customers of the
American insurance companies New York Life Insurance and Equitable
Life of New York. The Armenians were now dead and had no heirs, he
said, and the government was therefore entitled to their
benefits. "Naturally, I turned down his request," Morgenthau wrote.
Actresses Martina Gedeck and Katharina SchChancellor of the German
Reich, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, to the German ambassador’s
proposal to publicly rebuke Germany’s Ottoman allies for the
crime. "Our only goal was to keep Turkey on our side until the end of
the war, regardless of whether or not Armenians perished."
Part 2: ‘Wrongs’
The wealth of image and film documents gathered from archives as
distant as Moscow and Washington, says author and director Friedler,
even surprised the historians who provided him with expert advice for
his 90-minute film. Some incidents, such as the ostentatious 1943
reburial in Turkey of the remains of Talaat Pasha, who was murdered in
Berlin in 1921, will be shown on film for the first time. Other
documents depict individuals who the archivists had not recognized
there before.
The film also offers an oppressive description of the current debate
over the genocide, which is only now erupting in Turkey, almost a
century after the crime. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blusters
that Turkey will never admit that genocide took place. During an
exhibition on Armenia, ultra-nationalists angrily rip photographs from
the walls, and then, as if they’ve lost their minds, they attack a car
in which Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, is
being taken home after a court appearance — because he dared to
express what historians had proven long ago.
For decades, Armenians born after the genocide felt tortured and
troubled by it. "The tragedy," says Hayk Demoyan, the director of the
genocide memorial in Yerevan, has become "a pillar of our national
identity." And Armenian President Serge Sarkisian has told SPIEGEL:
"The best way to prevent the repetition of such an atrocity is to
condemn it clearly."
The post-genocide generation of Turks had no trouble sleeping. Mustafa
Kemal Atathat read "We are all Armenians," humiliated their own
government with their forthrightness. A reality which thousands of
Turks are confronted with in their own families appears to have had a
stronger impact than diplomatic pressure.
In the early 1980s, Istanbul attorney Fethiye tin discovered that she
had Armenian roots. Her grandmother Seher had confided in her after
several anguishing decades. In 1915 Seher, who was baptized with the
Armenian name Heranush, witnessed the throats of men in her village
being slit. She survived, was taken in by the family of a Turkish
officer, was raised as a Muslim girl and eventually married a
Turk. She became one of tens of thousands of "hidden Armenians" who
escaped the murderers and blended in with Turkish society.
Her grandmother’s revelation came as a shock to tin, and she began to
see her surroundings with different eyes. In 2004, tin wrote a book in
which she outlined the history of her family. "Anneannem" ("My
Grandmother") became a bestseller, and countless readers contacted
tin, many with words of appreciation.
Others cursed her as a "traitor." But the taboo had been broken.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Demons of the Past: The Armenian Genocide and the
Turks< orld/0,1518,687449,00.html>
Photo Gallery: An Atrocity of the Ottoman
Empire< e/fotostrecke-53534.html>
Aghet: Ein Volkermord< roduktionen/aghet/>