The Jewish writer who took the Armenian genocide as his subject

Forgive me for writing about a writer I have never read, but the following thoughts have more to do with his example than his words. Sometimes a writer’s life alone can tell a story. But I will, the moment the occasion presents itself, read the The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by the sometime Jewish, sometime Catholic, Austro-Bohemian novelist Franz Werfel.

Published in 1933, Werfel’s novel recounts the horrors of the Armenian genocide through the heroic exploits of a group of Armenian partisans holding out against the Turks in Musa Dagh (Moses Mountain) close to the ancient city of Antioch. In these days of wanton destruction it is worth preserving, if only by name, ancient associations. Soon, names will be all we have left.

Werfel was vociferous on behalf of his novel’s political character. This was no exercise in historical fiction. Werfel had encountered Armenian refugees while travelling in the Middle East. Touched by the sight of their misery and the stories they told, he set about researching the details of their “extermination” to understand how and why “one of the oldest and most venerable peoples of the world” had been put to the sword by their Ottoman neighbours.

Given the date of publication, it might appear that a second motive was at work. The century was developing a penchant for extermination. What had happened to the Christian Armenians in 1915 could easily happen again to the Jews of central Europe. It’s no coincidence that Werfel’s novel would later be read widely in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Christian Armenian story was the Polish Jewish story. The efforts of the Armenians to stay alive in Musa Dagh chimed with those struggling to survive the ghetto.

But before we get carried away by the idea that Werfel was surreptitiously, not to say bravely commending Christian Armenian anguish to the attention of Jews similarly endangered, and at the same time warning the wider world of what was unfolding in Germany, let’s wind time back a little.

Werfel was no longer calling himself a Jew when he wrote about the siege of Moses Mountain. Catholicism had beckoned him – it would be cynical to say conveniently – in the form of Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav Mahler, lover of Oskar Kokoschka and Walter Gropius and, later, wife to Werfel, a man she described as a “fat bow-legged Jew with bulging lips”. Here is not the place to discuss the psychology of a woman who hated Jews so much she had to sleep with them. But it’s not really all that complex once we allow there can be a germ of self-disgust in erotic love, and that part of its exhilaration is to let the body go where the mind would rather not. And don’t forget that Alma Mahler hailed from Vienna, a city whose morbid fascination with Jews was to grow to a madness that would find peace only in Nazism.

Werfel met Alma Mahler and fell in love, no doubt for the same perverse reasons she fell in love with him: there is no stopping a mutual attraction that has revulsion from yourself and abhorrence of the other mixed up in it. He wooed her with Verdi arias. I admit to being retrospectively jealous. As a young man I wooed, unsuccessfully, with Puccini. It’s important to get your operas right. Verdi worked for Werfel, anyway, and, by the logic that one good turn deserves another, Alma Mahler got him to give up being Jewish. By all accounts she didn’t meet too much resistance. For if this was the age of extermination, it was also the age of apostasy. The two, when you think about it, are not unrelated.

Had Werfel supposed that changing his religion would make a difference to how the Germanic world viewed his bow legs and bulging lips, he was mistaken. But he persisted, distancing himself from his origins more strenuously, it seems to me, than it behoved a student of atrocities to do. Is there no solidarity of the oppressed? Are there no lessons one hounded ethnic group can teach another? Well, it’s possible he thought that learning from example was exactly what he was doing. There’s loyalty, and then there’s practicality.

Unlike other distinguished writers of the time, Werfel signed an oath of fealty to the Prussian Academy of Arts. They still kicked him out. And for all his refusals to openly oppose the Nazis, they condemned him for making false allegations against the Turks, sniffed an analogy he seems not consciously to have intended, and burnt his books along with those of other Jewish writers who had not turned to Catholicism. Tergiversation wins no favours when the blood of nationalists is up.

It’s a sad, instructive story. How, precisely, it instructs us to behave I’m not sure. It doesn’t strictly follow – ethically or any other way – that to be powerfully struck by the violence visited on one people must increase your devotion to your own. But it’s a strange perversion of the imaginative faculties to feel for others what you are ashamed to feel for yourself.

In chronicling the extermination of “one of the oldest and most venerable people of the world”, did Werfel make no leap of association? Maybe he did. Maybe guilt explains it all. And maybe, as some argue, he dodged his identity in order to be sure The Forty Days of Musa Dagh saw the light of day. Who can say? But in the long run, calculations of this sort catch up with you, and you are left with neither success nor honour to console you.

It works the other way as well. Leaned on by Turkey and understandably wary of false equivalences – for not every death is a massacre, and not every war is genocidal – Israel connives in Armenian genocide denial. But the Armenian “extermination” is not false equivalence. And if Jews won’t acknowledge what happened on Moses Mountain 100 years ago, who will?