GERMAN DOCUMENTARY ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE PREMIERS IN BERLIN
Appo Jabarian
Executive Publisher / Managing Editor
USA Armenian Life Magazine
April 18, 2010
The 90 minute German TV documentary film "Aghet-Ein Volkermord"
had its premier on April 7 in Berlin’s Babylon cinema house.
Written and directed by Eric Friedler, the film depicts the "great
calamity" suffered by the Armenian people in 1915. Attending the
premier were German political figures, members of the diplomatic
corps and German-Armenian community. Armenian Ambadssador to Germany,
Armen Martirosyan, and film director Friedler, fielded questions from
the audience after the showing.
Below are some links for the German documentary "Aghet" which was
aired in early April.
The links are followed by an April 8 article titled "Demons of the
Past;The Armenian Genocide and the Turks" published on April 8 in
Spiegel Online International, the German leading magazine.
Preview
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Demons of the Past The Armenian Genocide and the Turks
By Benjamin Bidder, Daniel Steinvorth and Bernhard Zand Spiegel
Online International
April 8, 2010
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.
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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 Schuttler recount the memories
of two missionary sisters, one Swedish and the other Swiss. Hannah
Herzsprung and Ludwig Trepte narrate the experiences of two survivors,
and Peter Lohmeyer reads from the diary of German Consul Wilhelm
Litten, one of the most shocking documents of the time.
On Jan. 31, 1916, Litten was on the road between Deir al-Zor and
Tibni in present-day Syria, where he wrote the following entry into
his diary: "One o’clock in the afternoon. On the left side of the road
is a young woman, naked, wearing only brown stockings on her feet, her
back turned upward and her head buried in her crossed arms. 1:30 p.m.
In a ditch on the right side is an old man with a white beard, naked,
lying on his back. Two steps away is a boy, naked, back turned upward,
his left buttock ripped off."
Equally cold and calculating was the reply of then-Chancellor 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."
‘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 Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic, made a radical
break with the Ottoman Empire and the three men who were primarily
responsible — Talaat, Enver and Cemal Pasha. Ataturk admitted that
"wrongs" had been committed, wrongs his successors deny to this day,
but he also let government officials and military leaders participate
in his government who had been directly involved in the genocide.
A Living, Hidden Memory
The demons of the past are now awakening in response to pressure,
particularly from the Armenian Diaspora. Every spring, before the April
24 anniversary of the arrests of Armenian politicians and intellectual
in what was then Constantinople, arrests that marked the beginning of
the deportations in 1915, more national parliaments adopt resolutions
to acknowledge the Armenian genocide: France in 2001, Switzerland in
2003 and, this year, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House
of Representatives and the Swedish parliament.
Every time one of these resolutions is passed, Ankara threatens with
political consequences — and ultimately never follows through. It
has become a ritual, the purpose of which men like Hrant Dink have
questioned. The publisher of the Turkish-Armenia newspaper Agos
didn’t dwell on the definition of the world "genocide." Instead,
he wanted Turkey to confront its gruesome past directly.
He paid for his views with his life. On Jan. 19, 2007, Dink was
murdered in broad daylight. The 200,000 Turks who marched through
the streets of Istanbul at his funeral, holding up banners that 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 Cetin 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 Cetin, and she began
to see her surroundings with different eyes. In 2004, Cetin wrote a
book in which she outlined the history of her family.
"Anneannem" ("My Grandmother") became a bestseller, and countless
readers contacted Cetin, many with words of appreciation.
Others cursed her as a "traitor." But the taboo had been broken.