BERLIN — It could have been an ecumenical conference of Eastern Christians: there were Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Orthodox, Syriac Aramaic; but there were also Turks, Kurds and Alevites, as well as many, many Germans. They had all gathered in Berlin-Friedenau on October 20 to celebrate together the festive bestowal of the German Federal Cross of Merit on Tessa Hofmann Savvidis. Their presence symbolized at once the diversity — and the unity — of religious, ethnic and political communities with whom Hofmann has collaborated and for whose human rights she has fought.
State Secretary for Culture and Solidarity Kerstin Richter-Kotowski officially presented the award, reading the decree signed by German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Sketching Hofmann’s career, Richter-Kotowski introduced her as a scholar, a graduate of the Berlin Free University, who specialized in sociology, Armenian and Slavic languages. A teacher and author of numerous academic studies on the genocide under the Ottoman Empire, Hofmann, she said, was also an active human rights campaigner and founder of organizations and initiatives dedicated to defending minorities, among them, the Working Group for Recognition, Against Genocide, for International Understanding (AGA) and the Berlin Ecumenical Memorial for the Victims of the Genocide of Christians in the Ottoman Empire (FÖGG).
As Richter-Kotowski pinned the medal on Hofmann’s jacket and handed her the award, the entire room rose for a standing ovation, cheering her on.
Hofmann accepted the award “as a tribute to all the goals that those present here have also dedicated their lives to achieving,” she said, thanking them for “supporting and contributing to my human rights work and related causes over the years, and in some cases even decades, as civil society initiatives, associations, institutions, and individuals.”
She sketched the process through which, in university studies of Armenian and Slavic languages, she became aware of the genocide against the Armenians, then the Greeks and Syrian Christians, as well as victims of subsequent genocides. From lecturing and publishing, she progressed to active campaigning for genocide recognition, and defending human rights of other oppressed minorities. Hofmann’s Slavic language studies and sociology led her to discover Armenia, divided and contested by the Russian and Ottoman empires, and further study of its history and literature revealed the wound left by the genocide — a wound that Turkey’s denial has kept open.
“Nothing poisons relations between peoples as much as the denial of genocide,” she stated.
