POTSDAM, Germany — Among the required reading for most
Armenians is the novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel, and the
author is thus known among Armenians mainly
— if not exclusively — for this
monumental work. But, as a conference held on March 10-12 in Potsdam, Germany
documented, Werfel’s literary accomplishments include a large number of other
significant works which deal with a vast array of issues. The title of the
three-day conference cosponsored by the Lepsius House and the Moses Mendelssohn
Center in Potsdam already gives a sense of the scope of his activity which has
been the subject of extensive research: “Genocide and Literature: Franz Werfel
in an Armenian-Jewish-Turkish-German Perspective. In the course of the speeches
and concluding round table discussion, speakers from Germany, France, Austria
and the United States shed new light on the many facets of this extraordinarily
complex figure.
Peter Stephan Jungk, who has written a Werfel biography,
introduced the author with an overview of his life and works, and remarked that
doing research for the book took him on a journey through the first half of the
20th century. In fact, Werfel had experienced World War I first-hand and
suffered persecution under the Nazi regime prior to World War II. Although he
was born in 1890 in Prague to Jewish parents, as a youth Franz did not receive
formal religious instruction and became in fact enamored of Christian culture.
This was due to a close relationship he had with governess Barbara Simunkova, a
Catholic who took him to mass and taught him prayers. His early exposure to
both religious cultures was the source of a theme that was to become a
leitmotif in his thoughts and works. At 12, a passionate opera goer and Verdi
fan (he wrote Verdi. Novel of the Opera, 1924), Franz started composing poetry
at 16 and his first volume of verse published in 1911, Der Weltfreund (Friend
of the World), was a bestseller. Other works in drama and fiction followed,
many crowned with success. Musa Dagh, which appeared in 1933, was acclaimed and
rightly seen as a foreboding to Jews in Germany. When, in May 1933, his book
was publicly burned along with others by the Nazis, Werfel’s persecution began.
He had to flee Vienna after the 1938 Nazi invasion, and, after the Nazis
entered Paris, he fled Zurich via France for the US, where he settled in
California.
Who was Franz Werfel really? As Prof. Hans Dieter
Zimmermann of Berlin put it, there were three souls in the author — a German, a Czech and a Jewish soul. A
member of the celebrated Prague circle along with Max Brod, Franz Kafka and
others, Werfel was a German-speaking Jew like the majority of his intellectual
companions, but they were a tiny minority in Czechoslovakia. Politically they
stood apart from the other German-speakers, the Sudetendland Germans in
Bohemia, who were pro-Nazis. Forced by political developments to move from
place to place, Werfel often asked himself where his “homeland” really was.
Werfel also had a Christian soul, to be precise, as
Viennese scholar Dr. Olga Koller put it, a Catholic soul. In his works, he
“lived between two religions” and “felt at home in both.” Thus, Paul Among the
Jews: A Tragedy (1926) and his novel, Jeremiah: Listen to the Voice (1937),
which dealt with Jewish figures, came from the same pen that wrote Barbara oder
die Frommigkeit (Barbara, or Piety, 1929), Der veruntreute Himmel (Embezzled
Heaven, 1939) which relates the tale of a woman seeking assurances of entering
heaven, as well as The Song of Bernadette (1941), featuring the young girl and
her vision at Lourdes. If Martin Buber reacted to his Christian writings with
accusations of “betrayal,” his wife, Alma Mahler, pressured him to renounce
Judaism.
His commitment to the Armenian cause was unequivocal. It
was during his second trip through the Middle East in 1930, which took him and
his wife through Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, that he came face to face
with the issue. In Damascus he saw groups of abandoned, dirty, hungry children,
whose huge dark eyes haunted him. When he asked who they were, he learned that
they were the survivors of the Armenians massacred by the Turks, and that no
one was caring for them. As Prof. Andreas Meier from Wuppertal recalled, Werfel
could not get their images out of his mind and the idea for the book “became
virulent.”
The Werfels were not the only author couple travelling in
the region at that time, Meier said. There was also Armin Wegner and his wife,
and he too set out to write about the Armenian Genocide. The story of how the
two men approached the subject and how a literary controversy ensued was
treated by several speakers in Potsdam.
Dr. Rolf Hosfeld, director of the Lepsius House, focused
on the historical facts behind Werfel’s novel, identifying the real-life
figures who inspired the leading protagonists in the novel: priest Dikran
Andreasian (Aram Tomasian) and Moses Der-Kaloustian (Gabriel Bagradian), the
former military officer who led the resistance.
In his summary of the account, Hosfeld distinguished fact
from fiction: in addition to the two historical personalities, the story of the
flight up the mountain was true, as were the descriptions of the three Turkish
attacks, the signs calling for help, the altar the resisters built, and the
fire which alerted the French ship Guichon and led to their rescue. The
dramatic encounter between the German humanitarian Dr. Johannes Lepsius and
Young Turk War Minister Enver Pasha also corresponds to reality, as recorded by
Lepsius himself in his report.
The rest, as Prof. Martin Tamke from Gottingen detailed,
was fiction. Herein lies the main difference between the approaches taken by
Wegner and Werfel. When Wegner read in a newspaper in 1933 that Werfel was
touring to present his new book, he was shocked and accused the author of having
taken his material. Wegner, who had witnessed the Genocide as a medic in the
German army, had documented the atrocities in photographs, and later also
interviewed survivors, visiting them in camps, could not believe that Werfel
could have written such a book without having had this first-hand knowledge. In
their correspondence on the controversy, Werfel expressed his respect for
Wegner’s eyewitness experience, but could not acknowledge him as a source. He
also specified that he had isolated a single episode for his novel, whereas
Wegner, in his diary, had been compiling material for a historical account. For
Werfel, Tamke said, the aim was not to write an eyewitness report but poetry, a
work of art.
In addition to researching the saga of the resistance,
Werfel also drew on his extensive knowledge about the Armenian church, or,
better, churches. As Prof. Hacik Gazer from Erlangen explained, Werfel was
familiar with the Armenian churches and cloisters in Venice and Vienna, and the
documents in the Mkhitarist archives there which provided him with valuable
source material.
Through his contact with art historian Josef Strzygowsky,
he learned about Armenian church architecture. Significantly, his references in
the novel are not limited to the Armenian Apostolic Church, but include several
figures from the Protestant churches and missionaries, thus expressing an
“ecumenical” approach. Gazer also noted that Lepsius, before his encounter with
Enver, had met with the Patriarch Zaven, and that the fictional figure,
Juliette (Bagradian’s wife) converts from Catholicism to the Apostolic Church.
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh made history, not only as a
work of art, but as a political message. Prof. Rubina Peroomian, an expert on
Genocide literature from Los Angeles, cited several ways it has been honored.
There is the new English translation by David R. Godine which represents a
complete and accurate rendition of the German original. Werfel, “a virtual
Armenian saint” and a “national hero,” was honored with his wife in New York
City in 1935 by the Armenian community. A plaque in Toulon plays tribute to the
sailors who rescued the Armenians and carries Werfel’s name. The survivors of
Musa Dagh and their descendants, though scattered through the world, have an
association and members meet every year in September to celebrate their
victory. Peroomian also reported on how an Armenian translation had been
smuggled into Soviet Armenia in 1935, and later in the 1960s inspired
dissidents and a nationalist revival. In 1988, as the political climate
changed, it was republished. Now there is a memorial plaque dedicated to Werfel
at the Armenian Genocide monument in Tsitsernakaberd alongside those
commemorating Lepsius, Wegner and others.
But if the novel has brought Werfel recognition and
praise, it has also been slandered, suppressed and officially banned. Dr. Werner
Tress of Potsdam reported that, although Werfel’s earlier works had made him
famous by 1933, after the Nazis took power he was persecuted, expelled from a
writers’ association, and his novel publicly burned. With the aid of
projections of actual documents from the Nazi era, Tress showed how one after
the other, political and literary organizations issued black lists of
publications considered “damaging” and “undesirable,” and therefore banned.
Werfel’s name features prominently in all the documents, sometimes with several
works listed by title, other times, with “complete works.” On one black list
put out by the Bavarian Political Police, among the 15 books by Werfel, there
is a “+” mark added to Musa Dagh. This sign meant that if that book were found in
the possession of private persons, in house searches, it would be confiscated
and the owners put under pressure. Publishers and distributors were ordered not
to deliver the book and customs officials stopped any copies coming across the
border into Germany.
Even long after the defeat of Nazi Germany and in faraway
America, Werfel’s monumental work has continued to spark hefty political
controversy. Most clamorous was the fight around a film version of The Forty
Days of Musa Dagh. Planned by MGM in Hollywood in 1935, the original production
never made it into movie theatres, due to insistent, heavy-handed intimidation
by Turkish authorities. As Dr. Raffi Kantian from Hannover related, the Turkish
government made known through diplomatic channels that it wanted to stop the
project, which, if completed, would “harm” Armenians in Turkey. Other pressure
consisted of threats to ban all MGM films in Turkey, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and
Greece, while rumors circulated that it was a “Jewish-Armenian plot,” etc.
The political impact of Werfel’s work is still felt
today, in the form of the continuing strife around Turkish recognition of the
past. In a concluding roundtable discussion addressing the issue in the context
of European integration, Markus Merkel, a Social Democrat who introduced a
resolution on the Armenian Genocide into the German Bundestag in 2005, called
for an official exhibit to be organized in Berlin in 2015. He expressed his
hope that the Armenian Diaspora would wield its influence to promote democratization
in Armenia as well as in Turkey, lending support to the expanding debate in
Turkish civil society around the Genocide.
3 Comments
Patrick Mehr
March 19, 2013 at 4:42 pm
The biography of Franz Werfel by Peter Stephan Jungk is
now available as an eBook from Plunkett Lake Press
http://www.plunkettlakepress.com/fw.html
Vartan Tashjian
March 20, 2013 at 7:45 am
a great article…so much information on this great writer
and his works.
Philip Brantinghsm
April 22, 2013 at 3:29 pm
A tragically forgotten writer, Franz Werfel deserves much
better. Searching for his books today is hopeless. Even “Bernadette,” his most
popular novel is hard to find. His novels are in my opinion his greatest
legacy, while his poetry, for all its beauty, is admired only in
German-speaking countries. As for his dramas, simply have lost all currency,
save for one: “Jacobowki and the Colonel,” still done in college drama
societies. Werfel is a wonderful writer, and neglect is a shame.
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