UTTERING THE UNUTTERABLE: PROSE ABOUT GENOCIDE
ARTS | OCTOBER 24, 2013 12:49 PM
By Muriel Mirak-Weissbach
Special to the Mirror-Spectator
BERLIN –How can you express “the unspeakable” in writing? Is it at
all possible? The unspeakable or indescribable, in this case, being
the atrocities of mass murder, in the Armenian genocide of 1915,
the suffering of the Greek victims of the massacres and deportations
in 1922-3, the elimination of European Jews in the Holocaust. Those
courageous few, whether survivors of the catastrophic events, or their
offspring, or contemporary witnesses, who put down their recollections
and reflections in writing, have given birth to a vast literature,
the literature of memory, of genocide.
Leading protagonists in this literary process gathered from October
11-13, under the auspices of the Evangelical Academy in Berlin.
Co-sponsors of the conference were the Working Group for Recognition
— Against Genocide, for International Understanding (AGA) and the
German-Armenian Society, Frankfurt. Peter Balakian, who had travelled
from the US to participate in the conference, noted that being there
Schwanenwerder so near the Wannsee was “heavy;” after all, it was
there at the conference bearing its name that the Nazi leadership met
in January 1942 to map out the “final solution to the Jewish problem,”
what was to go down in history as the Holocaust.
In her opening welcome, Dr. Tessa Hofmann, founding member of the AGA
and one of the first in Germany to spread knowledge of the Armenian
Genocide, quoted Theodor W. Adorno’s famous 1951 remark, “To write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” and noted that long before that,
in 1920, author Zapel Esayan from Constantinople had questioned
whether or not one could express the indescribable in literature:
“It is definitely possible to relate single episodes from this huge
martyrdom, yet no human language can give an account of this dreadful
thing in its totality, namely to eliminate a whole race.”
What emerged from the intensive, emotional discussion was that although
it is impossible to replicate the catastrophe, writers have succeeded
in transmitting its essence. Here it is particularly fiction, Hofmann
said, that “assumes the task that journalism or scientific literature
cannot or will not cover.” The reason lies in the poetical character
of fictional literature, which, as the German word for poetry —
Dichtung — expresses, condenses reality in images which transmit a
deeper reality than that contained in the chronicle of events.
So, for example, Elias Venezis depicted the case of the forced
transfer of Greeks from Smyrna after its occupation by Turkish
military in 1922. Dr. Michaela Prinzinger spoke on “Elias Venezis:
Growing Up under the Risk of Death.” As a child he lived through the
horrors of the Greek-Turkish war, and recalled how his grandfather
grabbed a handful of earth to taken with him, a symbol of his lost
homeland. Venezis wrote also of his arrest in 1922 and his suffering
as a forced laborer in his book, Number 31328. Prinzinger showed
several clips from a film based on the book and titled 1922. In it
director Nikos Koundouros summarized the tragedy of an entire people
in the story of three individuals, one the young boy Elias, another,
a young woman, one of the many who were raped, who goes insane.
Dr. Magdalena MarszaÅ~Bek, a professor from Potsdam university,
spoke on “Concentration Camp Literature: Early Polish
Contributions.” Although this genre includes works on experiences
in the Soviet Gulags, she concentrated on those dealing with the
Nazi concentration camps, specifically Tadeus Borowski and Zofia
NaÅ~Bkowska, two non-Jewish writers. She cited Holocaust survivor
Henryk Grynberg to the effect that Polish literature had a special
responsibility to treat this, since it was “in the epicenter of the
crime” — most of the Nazi extermination camps (like Treblinka,
Majdanek, BeÅ~Bzec and Sobibór) were located in fact on Polish
territory, whether occupied or annexed, and half of the 6 million Jews
killed were Poles. MarszaÅ~Bek distinguished between the position of
the victims and that of the non-Jewish eyewitnesses, and made this
important point: “In order for eyewitnesses to become witnesses, an
act of speech is required, in which the witness speaks for the others
and to others. Without such an act of speech, the eyewitnesses remain
imprisoned in the ‘grey zone’ of onlookers….” One Polish literature
expert contrasted the “eloquence” of the victims’ testimonies to the
“aphasia” (speech disorder) of the eyewitness literature. The roots
of the problem lie in the complex situation whereby Polish Christians
tended to focus on their own suffering under Nazi occupation. The
two communities prior to the war had been divided by religion and
language, anti-Semitism was widespread, and this “not only hindered
empathy but led not seldom to collaboration … and complicity in
murder.” In this context, the work of Borowski and NaÅ~Bkowska takes
on greater significance.
Borowski, who survived Auschwitz but committed suicide in 1951,
“presented mercilessly how the perfidious camp system — without
exception — dehumanized” its victims. NaÅ~Bkowska adopted a style in
which she “let her protagonists speak … without her commenting or
interpreting,” thus achieving an “aesthetic and intellectual distance”
which “recognizes the obscenity of the claim that one can understand
what has occurred.”
Coming to the case of the Armenian Genocide, Hofmann stressed the
role of the literature of the survivors’ children, among them Vartan
Hartunian and David Kherdian, as well as the grandchildren, two of
whom Peter Balakian and Fethiye Cetin were on hand in Berlin. In his
Black Dog of Fate, Balakian addresses the transmission of trauma
across generations, relating how his grandmother Nafina, in bits
and pieces, shared episodes from the Genocide with him as a young
boy. The stories would come out in coded words, he said, hieroglyphic
and highly symbolic and constituted one part of the process through
which he learned about the past, both his family’s experience and
the broader Armenian tragedy. His book, Balakian explained, is also
a development novel, in which he conveys what it was like for an
Armenian to grow up in a modern American setting in New Jersey.
Cetin’s book, My Grandmother, signaled a breakthrough when it appeared
in 2004. Although she was not the first Turkish author to approach the
taboo theme (Hofmann recalled the works of Ayla Kutlu, for example),
Cetin struck a deep chord in the Turkish population, particularly
members of her generation who began to raise questions about their
own family histories reaching back to 1915. The book recounts how her
grandmother Seher, shortly before her death, reveals to her, bit by
bit, what she went through as an Armenian child during the genocide,
how she was adopted by a Turkish family, and kept her secret for sixty
years. Cetin’s slim volume, which has gone through several reprints
and has been translated in many languages, weaves the threads of the
grandmother’s personal story together with the historical documentation
of the genocide.
Both Balakian and Cetin read selections of their works in the
original, and translators followed with the corresponding passages in
German. Asked by Dr. Raffi Kantian, publisher of ADK (Armenian-German
Correspondence magazine), about reports that the Turkish Cultural
Ministry had supported her book, she explained that it had initially
been neither supported nor attacked (as had works by Taner Akcam and
Hrant Dink, for instance) but that when an Italian publisher planned an
edition, it sought assistance and received it. The point she underlined
in her remarks was the importance of remembering; although girls who
had been taken from their families were told to observe silence, many
did not forget their estranged relatives and cherished their names.
Balakian, asked to explain how young Armenian Americans are dealing
with their distant past, contrasted the current generation with his
own; whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, the pressure to Americanize was
strong, now American culture has become more open to other cultures
and histories; the Genocide has gained interest also as a part of
the human rights issue.
As a counterpoint, Dr. Bernhard Malkmus, a professor of German at Ohio
State University, spoke about the Armenians’ destiny as seen through
the eyes of two Jewish authors, Franz Werfel and Edgar Hilsenrath.
Unlike Werfel’s epic account of The 40 Days of Musa Dagh, the work
of Hilsenrath, a Holocaust survivor, is not a historical novel, but
a fantastic work in the form of a fairy tale. The Story of the Last
Thought unfolds as the history of the Khatisian family told with the
help of a story-teller Meddah as the last thought of the dying Thovma.
It is the tale of a foundling taken in by a Turkish family and left
with no information about its own relatives. Malkmus interprets
the deathbed wish of Thovma as a metaphor for the Armenian people’s
yearning for recognition and reconciliation, and the life story as
a metaphor for lives which might have been, those of the unborn,
or perhaps someone born in 1915.
It was only fitting that among the three workshops offered during the
conference, one was led by Dogan Akhanli, whose best known novel,
The Judges of the Last Judgment, was inspired by Hilsenrath’s book
and shares its fairytale-like quality. Akhanli spoke at length about
how his experience with arbitrary violence, having been subjected to
torture in Turkey as a youth and jailed as an activist, led him as a
refuge in Germany to research the history of the Holocaust and other
genocides. His and other workshops, by Kantian and Wilfried Eggers,
who wrote on the genocide in the form of a thriller, provided the
rare opportunity to learn how creative writers tackle the challenge
of composing works whose subject is thought to be unspeakable.
(Muriel Mirak-Weissbach is the author of Through the Wall of Fire:
Armenia — Iraq — Palestine: From Wrath to Reconciliation and can
be reached at [email protected])
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