LE GENOCIDE ARMENIEN

The Armenian Genocide,done by the Muslim Turks,in World Literature

esperanto |
February 10, 2012

Between 1915 and 1918 the nationalist group “Young Turks” perpetrated a genocide of the Armenians, killing 1.5 million of them.There is the argument that being a Christian group had nothing to do with genocide.But this is not true, because:

1.About 200,000 Armenian women were spared because they converted to Islam. And they were forced to become the wives of Muslim men.

2.Therefore the fact that the Armenians were Christians was a factor.If you left Christianity and entered Islam you could even save your life.

Even before that Genocide the Muslim Turks had commited massacres on the Armenians

1.In the year 1895 (during the reign of the Turkish Sultan, during the caliphate, which lasted until 1924) at least 200,000 Armenians were massacred.

2.The Massacre of Adana in 1909 killed 15,000-30,000 Armenians.

There were three genocides by the Turks between 1915-1923

1.The Armenian Genocide (1.5 million)

2.The Assyrian Genocide (about 500,000)

3.The Greek Genocide (about 500,000)

All three genocides were (by coincidence?) perpetrated on Christian groups.

For more details on the 3 Genocides read:

http://www.chgs.umn.edu/webBib/links/

Franz Werfel (1890-1945)

Werfel is one of the writers of the expressionist movement was from the German-Jewish bourgeoisie of Prague.He was the friend of Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Beginning in 1919, Franz Werfel lived with Alma Schindler, the widow of the famous Jewish composer Gustav Mahler (1860 -1911) and former wife of the German architect Walter Gropius (1883-1969),the genius and founder of the Bauhaus movement. She was a musician and a grande dame of the Viennese intellectual world, Alma has a great influence on Franz Werfel They married in 1929.

In 1940 Werfel became interested in Bernadette Soubirous,the popular Catholic saint, and of her visions of the Virgin in a grotto near Lourdes. He vowed to write a book about her if Bernadette saved him from the Nazis. After crossing the Pyrenees with Heinrich Mann, brother of Thomas Mann, the best German writer of the twentieth century, and Golo Mann,the son of Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel and Alma Schindler reached Portugal,from where they emigrated to the United States.

Werfel wrote “The Song of Bernadette” (1941) and the novel became popular.He had previously written a famous novel about the Armenian genocide.

The novel “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” (1933)

It is July 1915 and the first massacres of what will prove to be the first genocide of the twentieth century had begun two months ago under the direction of the Young Turks government. But in a province of the Empire, 5,000 Armenians, refusing to be deported, fled to the mountain of Musa Dagh (the Mountain of Moses). About to succumb, after holding at bay the Ottoman army, they are saved by the presence of the French fleet, which was blockading the coast of Syria, in September 1915 they are able to evacuate to Port Said.

Why Franz Werfel wrote the novel

Written during the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, Werfel’s novel was intended to link the Armenian genocide and Nazi ideology. “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” was banned by Hitler and destroyed by the Nazis in several burnings of books.

Edgar Hilsenrath (born in 1926)

He is a German-Jewish writer, known for his novels “The Night”, “The Nazi and the Barber” and “The Story of the Last Thought”.

In 1938, he fled with his younger brother and his mother to his grandparents in Romania. The father had intended to join them, but then the declaration of war made it impossible,and the father stayed in France where he remained throughout the war.

In 1941 Edgar Hilsenrath, his brother and mother,were deported to the ghetto in Mogilev-Podolsk, Romania, which is now in Ukraine.The ghetto was liberated in March 1944 by Russian troops. Hilsenrath emigrated to Palestine in 1947 and then went to France to be with his family. In the early fifties the whole family emigrated to New York. In 1975 Edgar Hilsenrath permanently returned to Germany.

The novel “The Night”

He recounts with a cruel realism his experience in the ghetto. Hilsenrath takes the Holocaust as a central theme and never portrays criminals and victims in black and white.

The novel “The Nazi and the Barber” (1968)

This is the book which made Hilsenrath famous as a writer, both in Germany and the world.It is a picaresque novel .It is the life:

1.Of a man named Max Schultz, who is German and the son of a prostitute.

2.He is the neighbor of a Jew born the same day as he ,who is called Itzig Finkelstein, the son of a rich Jew.

3.But curiously Max seems to be a Jew, with black hair,and a big nose, and Itzig looks German,blond and tall.

Max becomes a Nazi and he works in a concentration camp and is responsible for the death of Itzig. As Max Schultz looks Jewish he takes the identity of Itzig Finkelstein and escapes to Israel.There he becomes a hero fighting against the Arabs and later works as a barber.

The Novel “The Story of the Last Thought” (1989)

This moving book is considered the most important literary that is about the Armenian genocide. Hilsenrath compares the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust.It is the story of an Anatolian village which is destroyed by the Turks.

1.The main character is Armenian Wartan Khatisian, whose son Thovma is dying.

2.Meddah, the narrator, tells about Thovma’s last thought – they say that last thought of a human being is timeless – the story of his ancestors, the agony of the Armenian people.

3.Meddah guides Thovma’s last thought to remembrance of the story of the Armenians,he tells him of his father, who, from a small idyllic village in the mountains, is dragged into the torture chambers of the Turkish leaders, who forced him to become the witness of the great Armenian pogrom of 1915.

A national hero in Armenia

Hilsenrath wrote about the past history of Armenia and made a moving funeral lament in honor of victims of all genocides. Despite the being fiction the author has carefully investigated and verified historical events.

In 2006, Robert Kocharian, the President of the Republic of Armenia, where Hilsenrath is considered a national hero, gave him the National Prize for Literature of Armenia.

(antisharia.com)

================