Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (1933)

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (German: Die vierzig Tage des 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.

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. Due to Turkish government efforts to prevent development of a film version, 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 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. 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."

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 Yoghonoluk, one of seven villages in Aleppo Vilayet, now Hatay Province, Turkey. (Bagradian's character was inspired by the figure of Moses Der Kalousdian, 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).