New Anthology in German Looks at Genocide Aftermath

The presentation unfolded in a series of selections from the book, interspersed with musical interludes. Ani Serobyan, an associate of Hofmann’s, read first from two Armenian authors whose accounts portrayed the loss of identity. Lusin Arshaluys Bakircian-Dolas was born under the name of Necla Bakirci in Ra’s al-‘Ain near Urfa in Turkey, the sixth of 13 children. In the selection titled “No Lullaby in the Mother Tongue,” she tells Heide Rieck on the telephone about her childhood. Once she had arrived in Germany, she dared to recover her Armenian family name as well as her grandmother’s first name. “When I was 18,” she said, “I married an Armenian, who had lived in Germany five years” and explained that as a “hidden Armenian” it was important to marry in her own ethnic group. Many immigrant Armenians followed this practice as a means of preserving their culture, after having lost their own language and traditions. Her own mother sang songs to her in Kurdish and told stories about her own mother, who had been so traumatized as a child that people later considered insane. Though Lusin had never spoken Armenian, and used Turkish in school, in Germany she had decided to learn Armenian, to be able to “sing to my grandchildren in Armenian.” She promised Rieck she would submit a piece for the anthology, since “our story belongs in schoolbooks,” so history will not be repeated. “In the end we are all human beings. We should live in peace.”

The second selection came from this author, and also told the tale of loss. As members of a group of Armenians from America, we travelled with Armen Aroyan on one of his countless pilgrimages to the Old Country. Looking for the villages of our parents, Mashgerd and Tsack, we found their names had been changed, but, like the “hidden Armenians,” their identity could be recognized. Despite the official government policy of denial, which includes the imposition of superimposed names and descriptions, “the stones cry out” in reality, and ancient Armenian churches and other monuments declare their heritage to the knowing eye. By the same token, if officialdom denies the past, those villagers whose ancestors had been resettled there from the Balkans, had no problem telling us what they knew and remembering the last Armenians who lived in their midst.

Tessa Hofmann read selections from Anastasia Kasapidou-Dick’s story, who was born in Greece as the fourth child of a Pontic Greek survivor. The Pontic Greeks, at least those who had survived the genocide, lost their lands and homes in the forced population transfer sealed by the Lausanne Treaty in 1923. Anastasia’s grandparents had been transferred from Pontos to Platania. In the evenings they would gather together in “Parakathi” and she would sit opposite the storytellers, those who, like her grandmother, knew the history of the Pontos. “They talked about how they lived in peace with one another and with the Turks, and how this idyll ended.” Forced labor gangs, escape, the “Great War,” political machinations and civil war, dictatorship and exile — all these tragic experiences were episodes in the storytellers’ tales. In the “Parakathi” they came together as if they were the chorus in an ancient theatre play. “The chorus mourned the catastrophes that made up their lives,” she wrote. The narrators told their sad and tragic tales to the next generation, to leave this legacy for the future. A Greek song that followed lamented the lost fatherland, whose memory lived on in the heart.

Abdulmesih BarAbraham, an Assyrian who has lived in Germany since 1967, has published accounts of their history, diaspora and human rights. The selection, read by Ani Serobyan, recounted his memories of life as an adolescent in Midyat, the religious center and seat of the Bishopric of the Orthodox church, as well as trade center of southeastern Turkey. There, in the city that had a Christian majority population up to the 1970s, any reference, even in the church, to the genocide was forbidden; if victims were remembered, it was as members of the community of Christian martyrs. No books containing references to the genocide were available. As witnesses to the past there were, however, the ruined churches and monasteries, and facades of houses riddled with bullets. Otherwise, there were the “countless, invisible scars in the hearts and souls of the survivors,” and these were the subject of dirges sung by his mother and grandmother to their children, songs about the Sayfo, the catastrophe. It was only with the immigration to Europe in the 1960s that Assyrians in his parents’ generation managed to overcome their fears and blocks, and began to talk about the genocide.

The reading ended with a contribution by Ali Ertem, who came in 1961 to Germany from his native land Turkey. His story is emblematic for many Turks who first learned about the genocide only after moving to a European country. In his native village where there were no schools, he received early instruction from a sister, and later studied in Ankara. By chance he learned of employment opportunities in Germany and with luck succeeded in qualifying for training. During a training course in electrotechnics in Bochum, he experienced “the most important phase in my life.” At the Ruhr university where he also attended courses, he heard one day from an Armenian student about the charges of genocide and was deeply shaken. “What suffering my forefathers were to have inflicted on Armenians in 1915! I experienced this as a profound insult.” He never thought that such an accusation would shape the course of his life, and actually become a vehicle of his salvation. Struggling with pain, shame, empathy and mourning, Ertem decided to search the truth, to do the research to find out about the genocide. Studies followed as he read works by Johannes Lepsius, Jakob Künzler, Vahakn Dadrian, Franz Werfel, Tessa Hofmann, Wolfgang Gust and many others, sought contact with intellectuals, attended commemorations. In the course of his 20 years of study, he came to the conclusion that he had no right to accept judgments from others on subjects that he himself had not personally investigated. “I had to learn,” he concluded, “that Turkish government officials and educational institutions officially lie.”

Discovery in the Classroom