The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
The cover page of the first volume of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Berlin, 1933)
Author(s)	Franz Werfel
Original title	Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh
Country	Berlin, Germany
Language	German
Genre(s)	Historical, War novel
Publication date	1933, (1934, 2012 English tr.)
Media type	Print
Pages	936 pp. (English tr.)
ISBN	0-978-1-56792-407-7

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a 1933 novel by Austrian-Jewish author Franz Werfel based on the defense of a small community of Armenians living in the Musa Dagh of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 during the height of the Armenian Genocide. The book was originally published as Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh 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 partial destruction of the Armenian nation during World War I. The novel is a fictional account based on the defense of Musa Dagh's Armenians who were facing deportations and massacres ordered by the Young Turkish government.

Although written as a novel, Werfel carried out a great deal of research and the historical background content of the book has generally been accepted as fact. In the 1930s, the Republic of Turkey pressured the United States State department to prevent MGM Studios from producing a film based on the novel. A filmed version of the story was eventually made independently and was released theatrically in 1982. In 2012, the publisher David R. Godine issued a revised and expanded edition of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh that incorporates virtually all of the material left out of the Geoffrey Dunlop's 1934 translation.

Plot introduction

Context

Franz Werfel had first served as a corporal and telephone operator in the artillery corps of the Austro-Hungarian Army 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. His experience of 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 is given in a prefatory note in the novel:

This book was conceived in March 1929, in the course of a stay in Damascus. The miserable sight of some maimed and famished-looking refugee children, working in a carpet factory, gave me the final impulse to snatch from the Hades of all that was, this incomprehensible destiny of the Armenian nation. The writing of this book followed between July 1932 and March 1933....Breitenstein, Spring 1933.

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."

Plot summary

Book One: Coming Events

Werfel narrative style is omniscient as well as having a polyfocus in which he moves from character to character as well as being an overarching spectator. For that reason, the connection between the author’s consciousness and that of his characters can almost read seamlessly. This evident as the novel opens in the spring of 1915, during the second year of the World War I.

Gabriel Bagradian, a wealthy Armenian from Paris, has returned to his native village of Yoghonoluk, one of seven villages in Hatay province. His view is dominated by a familiar and looming presence in this paradisiac landscape—Musa Dagh, which means Mt. Moses in Armenian. 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 Werfel develops this theme of estrangement throughout the novel and which is denoted with the book’s first sentence, a 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, and the apothecary–polymath Krikor, 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 informs several characters ranging from the idealized outsider–hero Gabriel 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 a artillery officer the 1912 Balkan War and 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 Antakya (i.e., Antioch) to inquire about his military status. In a Turkish bath, he overhears a group of Turks, among them the district governor, the Kaimikam, discussing the central government’s plan to do something about is Armenian problem. Bagradian is alarmed by what he hears and the dangers given the history of atrocities committed on Armenians, whose rise as the empire’s chief professional and mercantile class has alarmed Turkish nationalists. The dangers that this poses to his family are all corroborated by an old friend of the Bagradian family, Agha Rifaat Bereket, a pious Sufi Muslim and a dervish.

Back in Yoghonoluk, Bagradian begins 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 to be a real leader but more to help his thorough French wife acclimate to what could be a long exile in the Turkish Levant.

Despite the rumors of arrests and deportations trickling in from 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, as well as the quasi-feral orphan girl Sato and Kevork, a houseboy who had suffered brain damage as a child at the hands of the Turks. Iskuhi, too, is a 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 seriously consider 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 that is coming.

Book One also introduces the readers to the German Protestant missionary Johannes Lepsius, a real person, and his audience with Enver Pasha, the Ottoman War Minister, one of the Three Pashas, which also including Talaat Pasha and Djemal Pasha, 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 both sympathetic and damning, especially when Enver consult with Talaat on the progress of the deportations.

The remainder of Book One describes which Armenians decide on resistance and which on cooperation. 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 secret cache of rifles left over from the revolution of 1908, when they were allies of the Young Turks—and the subsequent burial of their church bells so that these do not fall into Turkish hands. Eventually the Ottoman military police arrive, the dreaded saptiehs, led by the red-haired müdir. They instruct the Armenians to prepare for deportations—and then leave after beating Ter Haigasun and Bagradian. Instead, 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 Kevorkian carry the last volumes of his magnificent if eclectic library to the Damlayik, the plateau where the Armenians have chosen as their refuge.

Book Two: The Struggle of the Weak

Book Two opens during the high summer of 1915 and with the establishment of Armenian encampment and defenses—the Town Enclosure, Three Tent Square, South Bastion, Dish Terrace, and other sites on Musa Dagh that become familiar placenames during the course of Werfel’s novel. A division of labor, too, is established as to who will fight, who will care for livestock, who will make guns and munitions, and so on. Indeed, a communal society is established despite the objections of the propertied class. The objective is to hold out long enough to attract the ships of the British and French navies that patrol the eastern Mediterranean in support of the Allied invasion of Gallipoli.

Characters who will figure in the defense of the mountain also come into more relief, such as the loner and former seminarian Sarkis Kilikian (who suffered the loss of his entire family during the pogrom-like Hamidian massacres) and the former Ottoman Army drillmaster, Chaush Nurhan. Indeed, Musa Dagh is presented as a microcosm of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Armenian life as well as being a test not only of Bagradian’s leadership, but a test of his marriage and fatherhood.

The Ottoman soldiers and saptiehs seriously underestimate the Armenians and their first engagement results in a Turkish rout. The victory forces the Turks to assemble a larger force—and it enhances Bagradian’s reputation as well as reconnects him to his people—and isolates him from Juliette and Stephan.

Stephan, too, reconnects with his Armenian roots, but the difficulty he experiences because of his Westernized childhood makes the novel a coming of age story as well war and love story. He wants to be an authentic Armenian, like his rival Haik and other boys. To prove himself to them, Stephan organizes a raid on a fruit orchard to replenish the Armenians’ stores. And to prove himself to Iskuhi, for he is as much bewitched by her as his father, he leaves Musa Dagh to fetch back Iskuhi’s bible, left behind in his father’s deserted house. (A long passage left out of the first English translation.)

Juliette apprehends the growing estrangement of her husband and son and seeks purpose and solace in nursing the Armenian wounded and her friendship with Gonzague Maris, which develops into a passionate affair. As the Turks resume their attacks, he tries to convince Juliette to abandon her family and the mountain. The battles include a heroic stand led by Kilikian as well as Stephan’s sniping attack on a Turkish gun emplacement. He and the other boys seize two cannons, a feat that forces the Turks to withdraw.

Book Two features a traditional funeral for the Armenian dead, including the ceremonies of the wailing women, who assist in the birth Aram Tomasian’s son, a difficult delivery that is seen as ominous while conditions in the camp start to deteriorate—for the Armenian victories can only buy time. Jemal Pasha is introduced in Book Two and is portrayed as a resentful member of the triumvirate grotesquely envious of Enver. The relationship between Bagradian and Iskuhi also comes into focus as it is conducted openly but only consummated on a spiritual plane. Their love, however, is interrupted by a reinforced Ottoman attack, which is repelled. Bagradian, too, orders a massive forest fire to surround the Armenian encampment with a no-man’s land of fire, smoke, and open terrain. Book Two ends with Sato’s exposing Juliette and Gonzague making love, Juliette’s coming down with typhus, and Gonzague’s escape. Stephan, too, leaves the camp to accompany Haik on a mission to contact the American envoy in Antioch.

Book Three: Disaster, Rescue, The End

After spending forty days on Musa Dagh, the Armenians are taken aboard three French warships and a British troop carrier that had seen the distress signals hung by the cliff. Jubilant that their prayers had been answered, the Armenians earnestly greet the landing party. The side of Musa Ler close to the sea is very steep and adding to the Armenians' difficulties, the ships cannot approach the land and thus it is necessary to construct boats to reach them. The process of getting on the ships is difficult and painful.

Gabriel, in an attempt to make sure everyone is on board the ships, gets left behind; he does not bother to signal for help but instead continues back up the mountain and when he reaches his son's grave, is shot by Turkish troops. The ships take the Armenians, exhausted and on the brink of starvation, to safety to a camp in Port Said in Egypt.

Reception and influence

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was met with critical praise when it was first published in 1933 and was eventually translated into 34 languages. When it was published in the United States in 1934, it sold 34,000 copies in the first two weeks. The New York Times Book Review described it as "A story which must rouse the emotions of all human beings....Werfel has made it a noble novel. Unlike most other important novels, Musa Dagh is richest in story, a story of men accepting the fate of heroes.... It gives us the lasting sense of participation in a stirring episode of history. Magnificent." Time called it a "stirring tale" and selected it as its December 1934 choice for its Book-of-the-Month Club.

Importance to Armenians

Werfel's novel has made him famous among Armenians according to his biographer, Peter Stephan Jungk. Citing Father Bezdikian, an Armenian priest living in Venice, Italy whose grandfather served and fought during the siege: "Franz Werfel is the national hero of the Armenian people. His great book is a kind of consolation to us – no, not a consolation, there is no such thing – but it is of eminent importance to us that this book exists. It guarantees that it can never be forgotten, never, what happened to our people."

After the first publication of Edgar Hilsenrath's novel The Story of the Last Thought in 1989 in Germany the critic Alexander von Bormann wrote in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung with regard to The Forty Days of Musa Dagh that was until then considered to be the most important book on the Armenian people in world literature: “But I think Hilsenrath's novel is significantly superior to Werfel's: it is a historic and poetic novel at the same time.”

German censorship

Werfel also wrote prophetically about the consequences of Nazi anti-Semitism; The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was labeled "undesirable" by the Nazi government and although not banned, the book was sold and purchased secretly. Werfel was expelled from the Prussian Academy of the Arts in 1933. Das Schwarze Korps, the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel, painted Werfel as an agent who created the "alleged Turkish horrors perpetrated against the Armenians" and also denounced "America's Armenian Jews for promoting in the U.S.A. the sale of Werfel's book."

Resonance among Jews

Main article: Jewish response to The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh also found a particularly warm reception among Jews in the 1930s. Many of them believed that the novel, though speaking about the Armenians, contained allusions to Judaism and Israel, which in turn dovetailed with Werfel's beliefs. Werfel's famous line in the novel which reads "To be an Armenian is an impossibility" meant much to Jews living in Europe and Palestine.

The novel's importance grew during World War II. Musa Dagh has often been compared to resistance in Jewish ghettos. The ghetto of Białystok found itself in a similar situation as Musa Dagh when in February 1943, Mordecai Tannenbaum, an inmate of the Vilna ghetto was sent with others to organize resistance there. The record of one of the meetings organizing the revolt suggests that the novel was often used in the ghettos as a reference to successful resistance: “Only one thing remains for us: to organize collective resistance in the ghetto, at any cost; to consider the ghetto our 'Musa Dagh', to write a proud chapter of Jewish Bialystok and our movement into history,” noted Tannenbaum. Copies of the book were said to have been "passed from hand to hand" among the ghetto's defenders who likened their situation to that of the Armenians'. According to extensive statistical records kept by Herman Kruk at the Vilna ghetto library, this book was the most popular among ghetto readership, as is recounted in memoirs by survivors who worked at the library.

In addition to Bialystok in 1942, many Jews in the Palestinian Mandate contemplated retreating to Mount Carmel and organizing a defense line due to prospects of a possible Nazi invasion of the region. Known alternatively as the "Northern Program", "The Carmel Plan", "The Massada Plan" or the "Musa Dagh Plan", it was envisioned as a bastion against Nazi incursions and to hold out against them for at least three to four months. Meri Batz, one of the leaders of the Jewish militias who had also read the novel, stated that the community wished to "turn Carmel into the Musa Dagh of Palestinian Jewry....We put our faith in the power of the Jewish 'Musa Dagh' and were determined to hold out for at least three to four months."

Historical notes

The French warship Guichen, pictured above, participated along with several cruisers in the rescue of some 4,000 Armenians who had taken shelter on Musa Dagh.

The resistance held up at Musa Dagh lasted, contrary to the book's title, for 53 days. Jungk states that the change of the days by Werfel "called up biblical associations: the flood lasted forty days and nights; Moses spent forty days and nights on Mount Sinai; Israel's time in the wilderness was forty years." The French warship, the Guichen, accompanying three other warships including the French flagship Jeanne D'Arc and a British troop transport, ferried out the remaining 4,000 people left on the Damlayik, transporting them to Port Said, Egypt.

Werfel's Bagradian was inspired by the town's defense leader, Moses Derkalousdian. Instead of suffering the fate as Bagradian, he moved to Beirut, Lebanon several years after the war ended and lived there for the next 70 years, serving in Lebanon's government for several decades as a quiet and shy member of Parliament. Derkalousdian died at the age of 99 in 1986.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Mehmed Münir Ertegün, Turkey's ambassador to the United States, successfully lobbied on behalf of his government for MGM to stop the production of the novel's theatrical adaptation.

Turkish censorship

See also: Denial of the Armenian Genocide

The popularity of the novel led Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Studios to purchase its filming rights. Actor Clark Gable was slated to play the role of Gabriel Bagradian but production had hardly even begun when in 1934 the Republic of Turkey's ambassador to the United States, Mehmed Münir Ertegün, was ordered by his government to stop it from ever being made. As the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey was intent on suppressing any mention of the Armenian Genocide, whether it was within its own borders or not. Ertegün turned to the United States State Department and told them that he "earnestly hoped that [the movie studio] would desist from presenting any such picture, which would give a distorted version of the alleged massacres." The State Department tried to assure Ertegün that the film would not include any material that would offend Turkey but Ertegün remained adamant. The State Department attempted to mollify the Turkish government by presenting it with the finalized script, although this did not satisfy it either. The film's scriptwriters offered several water-downed versions but Turkey still refused to budge.

MGM's production chief was astonished by this level of interference by a foreign power declaring, "To hell with the Turks, I'm going to make the picture anyway." The fact that MGM was moving forward with the production further enraged Turkey. Speaking to an MGM official, Ertegün threatened that "If the movie is made, Turkey will launch a worldwide campaign against it. It rekindles the Armenian Question. The Armenian Question is settled." Ertegün's threats were soon being echoed across the Turkish press. In a September 3, 1935, editorial colored with anti-Semitic overtones, the Istanbul Turkish-language daily Haber opined:

We will have to take our own steps in case the Jewish people fail to bring the Jewish company (MGM) to reason...The Forty Days of Musa Dagh presents the Turco-Armenian struggle during the World War in a light hostile to the Turks. Its author is a Jew. This means that MGM, which is also a Jewish firm, utilizes for one of its films a work by one of its companions...Declare a boycott against pictures by MGM...Jewish firms which maintain commercial relations with our country will also suffer if they fail to stop this hostile propaganda.

In the face of this pressure, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, conceded to Turkish demands and the film was scrapped. Michael Bobelian, a lawyer and a journalist, states that the "Musa Dagh incident is critical in understanding the evolution of Turkey's campaign of denying the crimes committed by the Young Turks....The standoff with MGM revealed that Turkey would pressure foreign governments to go along with its policy of denial." Another movie version was mentioned in the 1967 sales film Lionpower from MGM as being slated for production in 1968-69 but nothing came of this version either.

After several, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was finally turned into a movie in 1982, directed by Sarky Mouradian with screenplay by Alex Hakobian, but it was a low-profile production. In 2006, Sylvester Stallone expressed his desire to direct a film about Musa Dagh. According to Professor Savaş Eğilmez of Atatürk University but a massive Turkish e-mail campaign in 2007 pressured him into not proceeding with the film. In early 2009, reports surfaced that actor Mel Gibson was also considering in directing a documentary and appearing in the adaptation of Werfel's novel but was dissuaded after receiving 3,000 e-mails sent by a Turkish pressure group.

In an ironic twist of fate, the surviving Armenian community of Istanbul was even forced in the 1930s by the Turkish government to denounce Werfel's book and its content and burn it in public rituals, similar to contemporary Nazi book burning ceremonies and elsewhere. The Armenians would typically gather around in the courtyard of Istanbul's Pangalti Armenian Church and light copies of the book aflame.

See also

• Vakıflı
• Armenian Genocide
• Anti-Armenianism
• Denial of the Armenian Genocide‎

Further reading

• Minasian, Edward. "The Forty Years of Musa Dagh: the Film that was Denied." Journal of Armenian Studies. vol. 2, № 2, 1985-1986.
• _______________. Musa Dagh. Nashville, Tenn.: Cold Tree Press, 2007.
• Steiman, Lionel Bradley. Franz Werfel, the Faith of an Exile: From Prague to Beverly Hills. Waterloo, Ont.: W. Laurier University Press, 1985.
• Wagener, Hans. Understanding Franz Werfel. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

External links

"French Rescuers of Musa Dagh Honored." Armenian Weekly. October 16, 2010.