The Forty Days of Musa Dagh () is a 1933 novel by Austrian-Bohemian writer Franz Werfel based on events that took place in 1915, during the second year of the First World War and at the beginning of the Armenian genocide.
The novel focuses on a small community of Armenians living near Musa Dagh, a mountain in Vilayet of Aleppo in the Ottoman Empire that defended themselves there. The mountain is now in Hatay Province, part of southern Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast. Events in Constantinople (Istanbul) and provincial capitals, where the Committee of Union and Progress Young Turk government orchestrated the deportations, concentration camps and massacres of the empire's Armenian citizens are also part of the book. This policy, as well as those who bore responsibility for it, has been controversial and contested since 1915. Because of this or perhaps in spite of it, the facts and scope of the Armenian Genocide were little known until Werfel's novel, which entailed voluminous research and is generally accepted as based on historical events.Shemmassian, Vahram L. "Literature, Film, and Armenian Genocide Denial: The Case of Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh," in Between Paris and Fresno: Armenian Studies in Honor of Dickran Kouymjian, ed. Barlow Der Mugrdechian. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2008, pp. 547–69.
The novel was published in German in November 1933. It achieved great international success and has been credited with awakening the world to the evidence of the persecution and genocide inflicted on the Armenian nation during the First World War. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh also foreshadows the Holocaust of the Second World War due in part to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, which paralleled the novel's creation. In 2012, David R. Godine, Publisher, issued a revised and expanded English translation of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh that incorporates virtually all of the material left out of Geoffrey Dunlop's 1934 translation.Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop and James Reidel, with a preface by Vartan Gregorian. Boston: David R. Godine, 2012. Unless otherwise noted, text references to the novel are taken from this edition. Due to Turkish government efforts to prevent development of a film version,Harris, George S. "Cementing Turkish-American Relations: The Ambassadorship of (Mehmet) Münir Ertegün (1934–1944)" (Chapter 6). In: Harris, George S. and Nur Bilge Criss (editors). Studies in Atatürk's Turkey: The American Dimension. BRILL, June 17, 2009. , 9789047427803. Start: p. 177. CITED: p. 188. only one film adaptation from 1982 has been produced.
Synopsis
Context Franz Werfel had served as a corporal and telephone operator in the Austro-Hungarian Army artillery during the First World War on the Russian front and later as a propaganda writer for the Military Press Bureau (with Rainer Maria Rilke and others) in Vienna. The horrors he witnessed during the war, as well as the banality of the civil and military bureaucracies, served him well during the course of writing the book. His reason for writing the novel came as a result of a trip through Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon from January through March 1930 and is given in a prefatory note in the novel:
This book was conceived in March of the year 1929 [sic], during the course of a stay in Damascus. The miserable sight of maimed and famished-looking refugee children, working in a carpet factory, gave me the final impulse to snatch the incomprehensible destiny of the Armenian people from the Hell of all that had taken place. The writing of the book followed between July 1932 and March 1933. Meanwhile, in November, on a lecture tour through German cities, the author selected Chapter 5 of Book One for public readings. It was read in its present form, based on the historic records of a conversation between Enver Pasha and Pastor Johannes Lepsius.Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, p. 3.
Werfel does not mention here that he rewrote much of the novel in May 1933, responding to events in Nazi Germany and kept revising it up until it was published.James Reidel, "Translator's Note," in Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop and James Reidel. Boston: David R. Godine, 2011. Later, speaking to reporters, Werfel elaborated: "The struggle of 5,000 people on Musa Dagh had so fascinated me that I wished to aid the Armenian people by writing about it and bringing it to the world."Michael Bobelian, Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle for Justice. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009, p. 83.
Book One: Coming Events Werfel's narrative style is omniscient as well as having a "polyfocus", in which he moves the perspective from character to character and to the third person perspective. For that reason, the connection between the author's consciousness and that of his characters can almost read seamlessly. This is evident as the novel opens in the spring of 1915, during the second year of the First World War.
Gabriel Bagradian, a wealthy Armenian from Paris, has returned to his native village of , one of seven villages in Aleppo Vilayet, now Hatay Province, Turkey. (Bagradian's character was inspired by the figure of , whose Armenian first name was the same as that of the mountain.) His view is dominated by a familiar and looming presence in this paradisiac landscape—Musa Dagh—which means Mount Moses in Turkish (Musa Ler is the Armenian for Mount Moses). He thinks about his return to settle the affairs of his dead older brother and entertains pleasant reveries of his childhood, as well as more serious matters. Bagradian feels both proud and estranged from his Armenian roots, and throughout the novel Werfel develops this theme of estrangement, which is denoted with the book's first sentence, the question: ″How did I get here?″ Bagradian also considers his French wife Juliette and their son Stephan, and how they will adjust to their new environment, given the state of war that now exists and prevents their return.
Other important characters are introduced in Book One: Juliette, Stephan and the many Armenian characters—chief, among them the Gregorian head priest, Ter Haigasun; the local physician, Dr. Altouni; the apothecary–polymath Krikor and the Greek American journalist, Gonzague Maris—all characters drawn from Armenian survivors of the events of 1915, as well as from Werfel's family, friends, acquaintances and himself. Indeed, he personally informs several characters ranging from the assimilated outsider-hero (Bagradian) to self-parody (the schoolteacher Oskanian).
Bagradian considers himself a loyal citizen of the Ottoman Empire, even a patriot, eschewing the more radical Armenian parties, such as the socialist Hunchaks. He had served as an artillery officer in the First Balkan War of 1912, had been involved in the progressive wing of Turkish politics and had been a vocal Armenian supporter of the CUP and the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. Being a reserve officer, Bagradian becomes suspicious when he is not called up; learning that Turkish authorities have seized the internal passports of Armenian citizens further fuels his suspicions. So he goes to the district capital of Antioch (now Antakya), to inquire about his military status. In a local hamam (bathhouse), he overhears a group of Turks, among them the district governor, the Kaimikam, discussing the central government's plan to do something about its "Armenian problem". Bagradian was alarmed by what he heard. The danger, given the history of atrocities committed on Armenians, and their rise as the empire's chief professional and mercantile class, had alarmed Turkish nationalists. The dangers that this poses to his family are corroborated by an old friend of the Bagradian family, Agha Rifaat Bereket, a pious dervish (Sufi Muslim ascetic) who sees the Young Turks as apostates.
Back in Yoghonoluk, Bagradian begins to socialize with the Armenian community. His grandfather had a paternal relationship with the Armenian villages that dot the land around Musa Dagh, a role that Gabriel Bagradian assumes, not intending to be a real leader but rather to help his French wife adapt to what could be a long exile in the Turkish Levant.
Despite the rumors of arrests and deportations, trickling in from Constantinople (Istanbul) and other Ottoman cities, many of Musa Dagh's Armenians remain unconcerned about the outside world. It is not until four refugees arrive in Yoghonoluk in late April, that the full nature of what the Ottoman government is doing becomes clear, for the refugees bring news of the brutal suppression of an Armenian uprising, in the city of Zeitun and the mass deportation that followed. In a long passage, Werfel tells the story of Zeitun and introduces three more important characters of the book, the Protestant pastor Aram Tomasian, his pregnant wife Hovsannah, his sister Iskuhi, a quasi-feral orphan girl named Sato, and a houseboy named Kevork. Kevork, as a child, had suffered brain damage at the hands of the Turks. Iskuhi is the victim of a more recent atrocity: Her left arm is paralyzed from fending off a rape attempt. Despite her deformity, the Armenian girl's beauty and eyes attract Bagradian.
The story the refugees tell causes Bagradian and the Armenians who live around Musa Dagh to consider seriously resisting the Ottomans. Bagradian steps forward to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the villages and looks to the natural defenses of Musa Dagh and its environs. Ter Haigasun becomes his ally, in convincing the Armenian villagers of the peril.
Book One introduces a German Protestant missionary Johannes Lepsius, a real person, and Enver Pasha, the Ottoman War Minister, who with Talaat Pasha and Djemal Pasha (the Three Pashas), constitute the triumvirate that ruled the Ottoman Empire. The chapter, titled ″Interlude of the Gods,″ reveals the Turkish point of view vis-à-vis the Armenians and the West. Werfel intended his depiction, almost entirely drawn verbatim from Lepsius's published account, to be sympathetic and damning, especially when Enver consults with Talaat on the progress of the deportations.
The remainder of Book One describes which Armenians decide on resistance and which on cooperating with the deportation order. Bagradian camps out with his family and friends on Musa Dagh, to ensure that it is the right place to make a stand. Those who decide to resist, dig up a cache of rifles left over from the revolution of 1908, when they were allies of the Young Turks and subsequently bury their church bells, so that these do not fall into Turkish hands. Eventually, the Ottoman military police, the dreaded saptiehs, arrive led by the red-haired müdir. They instruct the Armenians to prepare for deportations—and then leave after beating Ter Haigasun and Bagradian. Instead of complying, the 6,000 Armenians march with everything they can carry, their animals and their weapons to a plateau on Musa Dagh. Bagradian hangs behind and observes the wailing women and the other graveyard folk—who represent the old ways and sympathetic magic of pagan Armenia—sacrifice a goat. Its meaning is propitious as well as cautionary. The chapter ends with Bagradian helping Krikor carry the last volumes of his magnificent if eclectic library to the Damlayik, the plateau the Armenians have chosen as their refuge.
Book Two: The Struggle of the Weak