Clark Attempts to Define State of Genocide Research

“We [Armenian scholars] too developed. We used to be dependent on [British historian Arnold] Toynbee, [Viscount] Bryce and reprints of [Ambassador Henry] Morgenthau’s memoirs. We wanted to be dependent on non-Armenian sources. Then we began to develop ourselves.”

The watershed year of 1982, he said, was when the Armenian Assembly was invited to go to Jerusalem to speak at a Holocaust and Genocide conference. Yet, the Turkish government used all sorts of pressure to force out the Armenians and close down the conference. “It was crippled, but did not close.” Hovannisian recalled that he gathered the papers that were to be presented there and published them.

Now, he said, the state of the profession has changed. Instead of printing books on the proof of the Genocide, it is not assumed that that has been proved and “we want to know why.”

What are needed now, he said, are Armenian scholars who are fluent in Ottoman Turkish in order to decipher Ottoman documents to find out just what happened. For example, he asked, why was it that in Kutaya, where Komitas Vartabed was born, Armenian were mostly left unscathed, while in other areas, the annihilation was absolute. He pointed to Ungor and said that he film and his walking in the footsteps of survivors and victims is precisely where Genocide scholarship should be headed.
“There are an increasing number of young, conscientious, trained scholars of various ethnicities” who are going to advance the field, he said. And when the truth is discovered, “one has to ultimately take a stand on these issues.” He also specifically praised Turkish scholars who are fighting for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. “When I began, this was inconceivable.”

Panelist Margaret Anderson, a German history professor at the University of California at Berkeley, spoke about the circuitous route she took to understanding the Armenain Genocide. She now teaches a course about the German response to the Armenian Genocide and said her interest in the subject came from the study of German and Ottoman relations. She noted that while she was studying history in college, she realized that each century offered a betterment over the previous one — the Renaissance leading to the Reformation and the Enlightenment — until the 20th century, when mass killings became commonplace. Her points of entry into Armenian history were Johannes Lepsius, the German missionary who documented the Genocide as it happened, and Franz Werfel, the Austrian author of probably the most famous work of fiction based on a true episode in the Genocide, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

Anderson spoke about her first trip to Eastern Turkey — Western Armenia — and said, “There was nothing there. All the remnants of the churches and villages are gone.”
She explained that the role of the Ottoman Empire in the history of Europe, both positive and negative, needs further study.

Panelist Nazan Maksudyan, a Turkish-Armenian historian from Berlin, suggested in her talk that her name, age and gender cause conflict in how people perceive her. Maksudyan, explained she is half Jewish, said that in fact, she is neither a typical polsahay nor an average Sephardic Jew. Also, she said that while she is a historian of the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, specifically studying orphans and women, it should not be assumed that she would tackle Armenian subjects. The assumption, she said, that “Armenians should work on Armenian history is dangerous.” She added, however, that she had delved into the Hammidian massacres and the Adana massacres of 1909.
After the discussion, both Akçam and Ungor addressed the issue of being scholars of Turkish descent who have dedicated their careers to the study of the Armenian Genocide, a line of work that can cause hardships on several levels for them.
Ungor humbly downplayed his role. “I’m not half as brave as Taner,” he said, adding, “I keep a low profile. There is a Dutch proverb: Fear is a bad advisor.”

Akçam acknowledged his concerns, saying, “I am scared as a human being. Any time I want to go to Turkey, I have to think a thousand times. I ask myself why am I doing this [field]? Then the other side comes up: what makes a human different from an animal? We think and we say what we think. This [work] makes me human and nobody can shut me up,” he said with emotion, to thunderous applause.

“We Turkish scholars don’t have any other choice than to serve” the legacy of Hrant Dink, concluded Akçam. “We can never give up.”

The program on Friday night was organized by Akçam, NAASR and Eric Weitz of the University of Minnesota.