Armenian Community of Berlin To Organize a Remembrance Service for the victims of the Armenian Genocide
The Berlin Remembrance Service will take place on April 24th, in the Friedrichstadtkirche (French Cathedral). Numerous representatives from politics, culture and academia will be taking part.
The commemorative speech will be given by well-known historian Prof. Dr. Volkhard Knigge (Director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation). An address will be given by Walter Momper, president of the parliament of Berlin. Also speaking will be Vartkes Alyanak, member of the board of the Armenian Community of Berlin. The artistic programme will be provided by actress Melanie Blocksdorf (recitation), the soprano Liana Aleksanyan and pianist Silva Schmedding-Farmasian.
Remembrance Service for the victims of the Armenian Genocide
24th April 2010, 6.30pm
in the Französische Friedrichstadtkirche (French Cathedral)
Am Gendarmenmarkt
10117 Berlin (Mitte)
“We bow before the victims who remind us that what has passed cannot be undone, but that from the power of reconciliation, a solid friendship can emerge. Fate has shown us that our responsibility lies in overcoming enemy stereotypes in order to create together a future in which peace and freedom, democracy and human rights are esteemed values.”
According to the wishes of many politicians in the world, an invitation for the 24th April should begin with these words. Will this text appear at the latest in the flyer for 24th April 2015 when the “initiated” process of “rapprochement” between Turks and Armenians has been pursued further? This question is to be answered with a clear “no”.
The 24th April stands as a symbolic Day of Remembrance of the systematic, state-ordered and implemented murder of 1.5 million Armenians in their historical homeland. The Remembrance Day does not commemorate a ceasefire agreement between two enemy nations. It is not a day that balances the national interests of one against the national interests of another.
Historical Truth – Political Strategies
As a worldwide Day of Remembrance, the 24th April reminds us of the fragility of historical truth when it has to stand up against political interests. For even today, in spite of the new “awareness” in Turkey that has been generated by immense pressure from the Western public sphere and politics, the discussion is raised of how many victims there really were, whether the Armenians were really innocent, and whether these massacres really have to be described as genocide.
Internationally, strategies have been deployed that strengthen Turkey’s politically developed and implemented denial in a sustained manner. The argument that politics should not decide upon history has become particularly prevalent in the press and the public sphere, and has been used to criticise the stance of the USA and Sweden on acknowledging the genocide.
Commemorating without Acknowledging?
The key words of this new strategy, which suggests commemorating without “burdening” Turkey, are reconciliation and tolerance.
The short-term perspective of this strategy has the following goal: To give the Armenians a sign that they are being listened to. The medium-term perspective aims at the following: To signalise to the Armenians that they are being heard in order to prevent them from speaking further – and thereby from disrupting the relationships of the European states to Turkey. The long-term perspective is calculated to achieve the following aim: In the long run, to anchor into history not the remembrance of a genocide, but talk of a massacre, which is seen in one way by some and in another way by others; a massacre to which one does not have to grant a fixed place in Europe’s culture of remembrance.
Thus, the 24th April 2010 is taking place in a political atmosphere in which Armenians are called upon to exercise restraint and ultimately, under pressure from a more powerful neighbour, to concede to a revision of history as a prerequisite for a “process of reconciliation” between the Republic of Turkey and the Republic of Armenia.
Responsibility of Generations
The role of political troublemaker which is today ascribed to the Armenians, and of which they stand accused, the role of those who cannot forget, will have to be further fulfilled. For there cannot be a remembrance that is built on lies. Whoever demands of the Armenians that they say a prayer for the dead without naming the reason for their murder, without being allowed to speak of the decades-long denial of the act and the vilification of the survivors; whoever demands that a bridge be built without providing a political foundation upon which to politically anchor the pillars of the bridge securely; this person is solely cementing the age-old games of Turkish politics with the question of the place of the Armenians and Arameans in history and in the present day.
The 24th April is a Day of Remembrance for the victims of the policy of genocide of 1915/16. This year, it is a Day of Remembrance of the fact that remembrance itself may still not be spoken out loud. And it is a promise: that the descendants of the survivors will not let themselves be discouraged from finding words for their remembrance.
These words will commemorate the members of their own families whose names are no longer carried, and the personalities from the political and cultural life of Constantinople who were arrested on the 24th April and later murdered.
These words can take up the promise made by the writer and theologian Krikor Naregatsi way back in the 10th century:
And even if I pledge myself to death, and never stand on two feet, like a man who is rationally named, … I will still devote my words to this goal of testifying against the evil that has struck me.
Programme
Welcome and introduction
Vartkes Alyanak – Armenian Community of Berlin
Address
Walter Momper – President of the Parliament of Berlin
Speech
Prof. Dr. Volkhard Knigge – University of Jena
Director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation
Recitation
Melanie Blocksdorf – Actress
Musical programme
Liana Aleksanyan, soprano
Silva Schmedding-Farmasian, piano
Following is the text of the spech that will be presented by Mr. Vartkes Alyanak, Chairman of the Armenian Community of Berlin:
Ladies and Gentlemen,
On behalf of the Armenian Community of Berlin, I am very pleased to welcome you here today to the commemoration for the victims of the genocide of 1915/16.
Since the beginning of this year in particular, the debate regarding the handling of the genocide of the Armenians has been creating a great stir.
However, in these debates, the concern is not with questions of commemoration. It is not with the question of what responsibilities should be drawn from history.
The concern is not with how the history of the Armenians can be brought back, how it can be written back into the history of a region from which it was violently and radically extinguished.
On the contrary: Today, the concern is with forms of rapprochement. The concern, as the Armenian President Sersch Sargisjan explained at the beginning of April in an interview with the magazine Der Spiegel, is that there is “no alternative to cooperation between the Turks and the Armenians”. And with the necessity of breaking through a “hostility that has endured for centuries”.
The concern is with the question of whether the USA and Sweden anger Turkey on an international level with the pronounced acknowledgement of the genocide.
In short: The concern is with forms of political arrangement.
It is with forms of communication on the level of international politics.
The concern is with integrating Turkey as smoothly as possible into the international plans for safeguarding security and cooperation in the 21st century.
The concern in all of these debates is not with the past and the future of the Western Armenian Diaspora. Thus, it is not with the remembrance of the survivors’ children and grandchildren.
It is not with the history of a 3000-year-old Armenia, which in 1915 was wiped from history books.
The concern is not with rediscovering the violently destroyed Armenian culture of modern times.
It is not with the native land of the Armenians, which since the 19th century, as part of an emerging Turkish nationalism, was declared as the “homestead” of a Turkish people.
The concern is not with the narratives of the survivors: with the weeks of deportation, during which they suffered hunger and violence, with the murders that they witnessed, with the deaths of their parents and siblings which they were forced to watch.
***
The, at times, harsh words in the rejections we received this year during our preparations, when we tried to invite guests from Federal and regional politics to today’s event, have cut me to the quick.
Allow me to put a personal impression into words:
Rarely in the last few years have I felt such a powerlessness as I do today, where one is pushed into the role of lobbyist; where one is no longer a member of a Diaspora with a centuries-old history, but rather a member of the “ermeni lobbisinin”, where one is dubbed as a nationalist who does not want to forgive.
Certainly – as an Armenian, in a sense, one is used to having to constantly explain oneself.
One is used to explaining that the history of Western Armenia, over a thousand years, has been quite different to that of Eastern Armenia.
One has to explain that we Western Armenians are not foreign Armenians.
In particular, one has to constantly elucidate that the Armenians were not a minority in the Ottoman Empire.
Moreover, today, one has to argue why one does not wish to “reconcile”.
But how can we reconcile?
“Reconciliation” makes a contribution on the level of politics.
Through political forms of reconciliation, parties are called to the negotiating table; programmes of economic and cultural cooperation are drawn up.
A “policy of reconciliation” strengthens the solidarity of the states of the international world society because it allows potential conflicts to be alleviated.
A “policy of reconciliation” allows the perpetrator states to enter into politics, not as perpetrators but as partners.
Whoever calls upon the Western Armenians today to reconcile is demanding not only that they forgive, but also that they consent to a strategically changed version of history.
In the years following the First World War, the stance of the young Republic of Turkey was determined by disputing the number of dead and explaining the deportations as a war measure.
Generation by generation, these arguments were continued and condensed: A network of counter-history arose that still stands to this day.
It is striking that new arguments are constantly being integrated into this counter-narrative: For instance, today, the systematic nature of the deportations and murders is disputed, terms such as massacre are favoured; false pictures are aroused by the fact that the history of the Armenians and the Turks is explained as one of enemy neighbours.
Let me give voice to the powerlessness, this powerlessness against the strategies of politics which, with each new decade, in some way cast a share of the blame onto the Armenians so as to diminish the perpetration of Turkey.
One feels powerless in the European public sphere; and yes – in particular in the German public sphere.
Here, if one wishes to open up the “question of genocide”, then roundtable discussions are insisted upon, which must be represented in a “balanced” fashion, meaning that they should be made up in equal shares of Turks, Armenians, and German experts.
If experts on the history of Armenia are consulted, then one asks perhaps academics or personalities from the Republic of Armenia, but not the people who carry with them the legacy of the genocide, not the descendents of the survivors.
For the literary and academic publications of members of the Diaspora are seen as biased and subjective.
What remains to us is little more than this day of commemoration, the day of remembrance of the 24th April, which grants a protected space to name the perpetrators and to be allowed to name the victims.
This day carries its importance as a protected space because it allows us to point out that the boundary between perpetrators and victims cannot be blurred, that the difference between perpetrators and victims cannot be qualified and will apply forever.
Even if one wishes to speak of forgiveness or reconciliation or, as the Republic of Armenia is doing, of cooperation, then this impenetrable boundary must still be acknowledged.
***
Currently, we must ask ourselves anew where the remembrance of the Armenians stands. Where it may have its place. Where it has a future.
In this respect, today, the Armenian remembrance initially finds itself in a space in which it does not really belong: for it stands in the space of constant self-explanations, of defence, indeed of having to justify why one is commemorating.
For the Armenian commemoration is accompanied by discussions in politics and the public sphere, in which it is not seen as a form of remembrance, but in which the criticism is levelled that it is a demonstration against the Turkish historical enemy.
In view of this framing, we are at risk of becoming so preoccupied with these explanations and self-declarations that we completely overlook that which we really have to mourn: Namely that we, as Western Armenians, to this day have no places of remembrance.
Should we build a monument? Ludicrous.
One can build all the monuments in the world, but as long as no monument stands at the places were the crimes took place, such initiatives are merely empty gestures.
I would like to be able to go to the place where my family once lived. I would like to see the street where our houses were. I want to see the wells into which the children were thrown and the church where women were burnt. I would like to see the schools that were once there and the workshops that were run by the Armenians.
I wish that on the Armenian rugs, which following the genocide were piled in metre-high towers in the mosques and later transported to European houses and museums, that it would again say on the rugs that they are Armenian.
I wish that the pottery could be again labelled as Armenian pottery in the museums and that the land surrounding the Ararat be considered in the history books as historical Armenia.
Should this be seen as Diaspora nationalism?
The desire to be allowed to once again name one’s own history as a history of its own?
***
A person who speaks today of rapprochement and of reconciliation, thus drawing attention on the one hand to political expedience between the Republics of Armenia and Turkey and on the other hand to some of the new, liberal voices in Turkish historical science and the public sphere, or a person invokes the instrumentalised positions of Hrant Dink; any such person is forgetting the Armenian Diaspora.
Such a person is carrying forward a disastrous policy of denial with a policy of ostracism and discrimination, which is ultimately to be found in the logic of the genocide itself.
So we must today say “no” to the thought of reconciliation, not because we are waiting for an admission of guilt.
We say “no” because due to the denial that has lasted now for almost one hundred years, a history, our history, has been snatched away from us.
And because in these current discussions, no readiness to acknowledge our history, to save it, can be discerned: on the contrary.
The price of the political rapprochement, the price of political reconciliation, is the betrayal of the history and the present day of the homeless Western Armenian Diaspora.
If we ask today about the place of Armenian remembrance, then we have to discern that we Western Armenians have been pushed into isolation.
In Germany, as in France, Switzerland or Austria, the Netherlands or Sweden, the USA, Canada or Australia, the Western Armenians are highly integrated citizens.
But in the public sphere, academia and politics, we are seen as a subjectively aggrieved party.
Every word is distrusted.
Every identification is criticized as a political statement because it stands in contrast to the conception of Turkey’s history.
The place of remembrance of the Armenians?
It is found in hours like those today.
Those attempts to find a protected space to be able to recount the fate of the men, women and children who became victims of the policy of violence after the Young Turks came to power in 1908.
It is those attempts to talk about the fate of denial, which is the fate of the descendants of the survivors, who will always remain survivors themselves, not only because any opening to remember and to admonish was given up, but because they have to feel it even in their own lives.
Thus, while some are currently speaking of cooperation, others of reconciliation and others still of monuments, the Western Armenian Diaspora is experiencing a new isolation: an isolation of their remembrance, their identifications and their present day.
The place of remembrance of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians and more than 100,000 Arameans is therefore an isolated place of silence.
The fact that this ostracism and isolation into which the Western Armenians are currently being pushed is so dense is caused not least by logics of the politics of a world society in which non-state communities are fundamentally seen as problematic actors.
Communities that are based on collective memories are counted as difficult because remembering is seen as irrational.
Ultimately, recollections are “lived” by those who carry them, thus from “subjective” persons who, according to political risk assessment, only defer to the “objective” regulations of institutions with difficulty.
The world’s breach in solidarity toward the Armenian victims, however, is above all connected to a second understanding.
Indeed, it is connected to a shared political perspective which emerged at the turn of the 20th century: that nations have to resist not only external threats, but also so-called “internal enemies”.
Nowadays, this means: states need coherence.
If a state produces the argument that a minority against which it is acting with violence was a “troublesome” minority, then the negotiated agreement of nations of not interfering in the internal affairs of other states comes into play.
Then, it becomes possible to disguise severe human rights violations as “ethnic conflicts”.
This is the mechanism which entered the arena of international politics for the first time with the genocide of the Armenians.
And this is precisely this pattern of arguments which is a main cause for today’s breach of solidarity: namely the refusal to accept the remembrance of the Armenians.
For just as genocide is not possible without an acquiescing political consensus, so too is the denial of genocide not possible without this acquiescing political consensus.
And in this way, the Turkish policy of denial was able to avail itself of patterns that were purposely tied in with fears – but also with enemy stereotypes – of the West; and it was again successfully able to achieve this after the notion of coherent statehood became so important following the 11th September.
Thus, the political world society is turning its attention to the Western Armenian Diaspora and marking it as a troublemaker, which poses dilemmas for political cooperation.
The response of the political world society is not to reflect upon the lack of place for non-state groups in the political, economic and legal world of the 21st century.
The response of the political world society is to set up a negotiating table for cooperation, at which the Diaspora has no seat, and at which the concern is with the future and not with the past.
This is what I mean when I talk about the isolation of silence.
This framing was created by the arguments of those who describe the Western Armenians as a nationalist Diaspora that bases itself above all on the instrumentalisation of its history, or by the arguments of others, who claim that due to their centuries-old hostility towards their “neighbour” Turkey, the Western Armenians throw their history into the path of important political negotiations.
We are left with no choice but to preserve our remembrance with doggedness.
A remembrance that not only has to contain explanations regarding how it really was, that we ourselves are consulted, that we are perceived as subjects of our history and allows us to provide information about ourselves, but also a remembrance that must enable us to live our history, our identifications.
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- A New Documentary on The Armenian Genocide Screened in Berlin
- Obama Again Avoids Using The Word Genocide In Armenian Remembrance Message
- California State Assembly Introduces AJR Designating April 24 As Day Of Remembrance For Armenian Genocide
is from the ancient Armenian oral tradition and culture, which was nearly obliterated during the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks in 1915. The author learned the tale from her father, editor and columnist C.K. Garabed, who would recite it to her at bedtime. He had learned it from his own grandmother, a celebrated storyteller from the Old Country. The tale was first put to paper by Armenian poet Hovhannes Toumanian at the turn of the 20th century.
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