REDISCOVERING FRANZ WERFEL: POTSDAM CONFERENCE ANALYZES LIFE OF BRAVE HUMANITARIAN
ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, ARTS | MARCH 18, 2013 4:54 PM
Franz Werfel
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.
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.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
