By Muriel Mirak-Weissbach / Special to the
Mirror-Spectator
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.
