The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

By Franz Werfel, Geoffrey Dunlop and James Reidel

The internationally acclaimed novel based on the heroic resistance during the Armenian genocide of 1915.

This is the story of how the people of several Armenian villages in the mountains along the coast of present-day Turkey and Syria chose not to obey the Turkish government’s deportation order. Instead, they fortified a plateau on the slopes of Musa Dagh—Mount Moses—and repelled Turkish soldiers and military police during the summer of 1915 while hoping for the Allies to save them . . .

Translator James Reidel and scholar Violet Lutz have revised and expanded the original English translation by Geoffrey Dunlop. The Dunlop translation, had excised approximately 25% of the original text to accommodate the Book-of-the-Month club and to streamline the novel for film adaptation. The restoration of these passages and their new translation provide a fuller picture of the characters’ lives, especially the hero Gabriel Bagradian, his wife Juliette, their son Stephan, and Iskuhi Tomasian. What is more apparent now is the personal story that Werfel tells, informed by events and people in his own life, in which the author, his wife Alma, his stepdaughter Manon Gropius, and others in his circle are reinvented. Reidel has also revised the existing translation to free Werfel’s stronger usages from Dunlop’s softening of meaning, his effective censoring of the novel in order to fit the mores and commercial contingencies of the mid-1930s.

“In every sense a true and thrilling novel . . .  It tells a story which it is almost one’s duty as an intelligent human being to read. And one’s duty here becomes one’s pleasure also.” —New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781567925159

Franz Werfel

Franz Viktor Werfel (* 10. September 1890 in Prag; † 26. August 1945 in Beverly Hills) war ein österreichischer Schriftsteller jüdisch-deutschböhmischer Herkunft. Er ging aufgrund der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft ins Exil und wurde 1941 US-amerikanischer Staatsbürger. Er war ein Wortführer des lyrischen Expressionismus.

Book preview

THE FORTY DAYS OF MUSA DAGH

Also by Franz Werfel in the Verba Mundi series

PALE BLUE INK IN A LADY’S HAND

Translated by James Reidel

FRANZ Werfel

The Forty Days

of Musa Dagh

Based on the translation from the German

by Geoffrey Dunlop

Revised & expanded by James Reidel with

a preface by Vartan Gregorian

A Verba Mundi Book

David R. Godine · Publisher · Boston

This is a Verba Mundi Book

published in 2012 by

DAVID R. GODINE · Publisher

Post Office Box 450

Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452

www.godine.com

Originally published in German in 1933 as Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh by Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Wien. Copyright © 1933 Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Wien. All rights reserved by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main. Originally published in English translation by Geoffrey Dunlop in 1934 as The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Viking Press.

Translation copyright © 1934 by The Viking Press, Inc. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group, USA. Revised and expanded translation copyright © 2012 by James Reidel.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information contact Permissions, David R. Godine, Publisher, Fifteen Court Square, Suite 320, Boston, Massachusetts 02108.

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Werfel, Franz, 1890-1945.

[Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh. English]

The forty days of Musa Dagh / by Franz Werfel ; translated from the German by Geoffrey Dunlop, newly revised by James Reidel.

p. cm.

PAPERBACK ISBN 978-1-56792-407-7 (softcover)

EBOOK ISBN 978-1-56792-515-9

1. Armenians—Turkey—Fiction. 2. Persecution—Turkey—Fiction. 3. Musa Dagh, Defense of, Turkey, 1915—Fiction. 4. Armenian massacres, 1915-1923—Fiction. I. Dunlop, Geoffrey, 1894- II. Reidel, James. III. Title.

PT2647.E77V525 2012

843'.914—dc22

2OIOOI4184

Contents

Preface by Vartan Gregorian

Translator’s Note

Book One: COMING EVENTS

1.Teskeré

2.Konak–Hamam–Selamlik

3.The Notables of Yoghonoluk

4.The First Incident

5.Interlude of the Gods

6.The Great Assembly

7.The Funeral of the Bells

Book Two: THE STRUGGLE OF THE WEAK

1.Our Home Is the Mountaintop

2.The Exploits of the Boys

3.The Procession of Fire

4.Sato’s Ways

Book Three: DISASTER, RESCUE, THE END

1.Interlude of the Gods

2.Stephan Sets Out and Returns

3.Pain

4.Decline and Temptation

5.The Altar Flame

6.The Letters in the Fog

7.To the Inexplicable in Us and above Us!

Notes

Preface

JAMES REIDEL, the translator and editor of this volume, told me that he first came upon the writings of Franz Werfel completely by accident, through a subscription to an East German magazine he inherited from the former tenant of an office where he was working for a legal publisher. Hence, his connection to Werfel, which eventually led to this new translation of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, was pure serendipity

Evidently, there were others who found that they had an unexpected but seemingly fated connection with this powerful book. Among them was Professor William A. Schabas, now director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a Global Legal Scholar at the University of Warwick School of Law. Professor Schabas is a leading scholar in the area of international human rights law and international criminal law. Schabas recalls the influence of Franz Werfel on the future course of his life and his work in this area, noting, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was probably the book that first provoked my interest in genocide.¹

He adds, In April 2005, I had the privilege of speaking at the conference organized in Armenia in commemoration of the 1915 genocide. My remarks began with reminiscence about learning of the Armenian genocide from Franz Werfel.

I, too, have an unusual connection to Franz Werfel – certainly, one I never expected. The circumstances are perhaps rooted in fate, which brought me to the University of Pennsylvania in 1972. In 1974, I became the university’s Founding Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In that capacity, I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of Professor Adolf Klarmann, who taught Austrian literature (as distinct from German literature). Visiting him in his office one day, I saw a death mask on the wall. Professor Klarmann said that it was Franz Werfel’s. Furthermore, Professor Klarmann told me that he was the editor of the complete works of Werfel. I informed Klarmann that I had read Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh in Armenian, when I was a teenager, and it had made quite an impression on me. In fact, as I explained to Professor Klarmann, I believed – and still do – that The Forty Days of Musa Dagh saved the Armenian genocide from benign neglect and gave a literary symbol of survival and renewal to the Armenians. For Armenians, Franz Werfel still embodies the conscience of European literature and its commitment to universal justice and the dignity of man.

During this conversation, I inquired when Werfel had died. Professor Klarmann responded, 1945. The next question, naturally, was about where Werfel was buried, and the answer was Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles. When I expressed surprise that the Austrian authorities had not transferred the remains of this great Austrian writer to his homeland, Professor Klarmann tried to explain that the workings of the Austrian bureaucracy were notoriously slow. His statement shocked me. After all, thirty years had already passed from the time of Werfel’s death... And then, I don’t know what came over me. I impetuously announced that I would find a way to repatriate the remains of Franz Werfel to Vienna.

Klarmann was astounded, but then became very excited by the prospect of carrying out this mission. I told him that I could only undertake the project with his help and so we became a team. He provided invaluable assistance. I could never have succeeded without him because I did not speak German and was unfamiliar with the workings of Austrian society and its bureaucracies. Shortly after making my declaration about Werfel, I called Rosedale Cemetery to inquire about the process we would have to follow in order to exhume Franz Werfel’s remains and transfer them to Austria. Naturally we needed money but we also needed two written authorizations, one from a blood relative of Werfel’s and another from a legal relative. Professor Klarmann succeeded in obtaining both, even though most of Werfel’s family had been wiped out in the Holocaust. Luckily, Professor Klarmann found a living relative in Israel from whom we ob­tained one of the necessary signatures; the other was sent to us from London by Anna Mahler, the daughter of the late Alma Mahler, who had been Werfel’s widow. Eventually, I secured the funds necessary to exhume Werfel’s remains and transport them in a coffin to Vienna. The coffin was a requirement of California law. In addition, thanks to Professor Klarmann’s extensive connections with Austrian literary circles, a committee was set up in Vienna to organize a number of events to be held in conjunction with the return of Franz Werfel’s remains. Among these was a major European conference on Franz Werfel’s artistic and literary legacy that gathered together many internationally prominent writers, critics, historians and others. In addition, Anna Mahler honored her stepfather, Franz Werfel, by sculpting a monument to grace his gravesite. Then, after all the formalities were completed and arrangements finalized, we sent a dramatic cable to Bruno Kreisky, Chancellor of Austria, saying Werfel is coming home.

While Professor Klarmann and I worked together on these efforts, it was my wish to remain anonymous. My only other condition, meant to imbue the occasion of the unveiling of the monument with deep symbolism, was that this should take place on a symbolic date such as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Subsequently, Professor Klarmann and I discussed other dates that might be appropriate, such as the commemoration of the Warsaw Uprising or the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Unfortunately, before all the pieces were in place, Professor Klarmann died and his widow, Isolde, made my role public. What was interesting was that, in the interim, one or two other organizations and individuals had claimed authorship of this initiative.... When the unveiling of the monument to Werfel finally took place, the Austrian government invited Isolde Klarmann, my wife, and me to attend the event, which was held in the Central Cemetery in Vienna, in an area where a great pantheon of Austria's most revered cultural figures are buried, including Beethoven and Brahms along with Austrian writers Ernst Jandl, Hans Weigel, and others.

One issue that we wrestled with at that time was how to in ­corporate an ecumenic gesture in the ceremony. Werfel was a Jew, and though he never converted – notwithstanding speculations to the contrary – had a deep affinity for Catholicism. When he first left Austria for France in the aftermath of the Anschluss, he experienced an extraordinary feeling of solace when he visited Lourdes. He was much affected by the pilgrims who came to this holy place and by the kindness of the Catholic orders that cared for the site. In fact, he later wrote The Song of Bernadette, a book that reverently told the story of the miraculous visions of St. Bernadette at Lourdes. As Catholic theologian George Weigel notes Though Werfel was Jewish, he was so deeply impressed by both Bernadette and the happenings at Lourdes, that his writing has a profound sense of Catholic understanding.² Weigel also expresses how moved he was by the fact that Werfel had entered into Catholicisms sacramental imagination. Bearing all this in mind, I asked the Armenian Bishop of Vienna to bless Werfel’s grave and his monument in the presence of the many dignitaries and officials who were in attendance.

On the occasion of the unveiling of the monument to Franz Werfel, the city of Vienna hosted a major luncheon in honor of the late Professor Klarmann and myself. At the event, Klarmann, posthumously, and I were awarded the Gold Medal of Honor of the City and Province of Vienna. Isolde Klarmann accepted it on behalf of her late husband. Naturally, I was pleased by this singular honor. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was dampened by the citation. It made no mention of Werfel, the Jews, the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide but instead, offered congratulations for our administrative and organizational talents. In my brief remarks upon receiving the Gold Medal, I tried to rectify the fact that Werfel himself had not been recognized as part of the ceremony by highlighting the importance of his master work, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which was the source of my inspiration and hence, support for the effort to transfer Werfel’s remains home to Austria. I also spoke about the fact that The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was published in 1933, when Hitler and the Nazi Party were assuming power. Therefore, I said, the novel serves as an allegory, a not-so-veiled warning about the virulent racialism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, and amoral real – politik that were about to be unleashed by the Nazis. It was a wake-up call for Jews and non-Jews alike about the impending calamity that was soon to engulf the Jews of Germany and German-speaking lands.

My remarks were founded on my conviction that The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was meant as a memorial set against a new historical phenomenon that had been described as the murder of a nation, the extermination of a race, and the assassination of Armenia by historian Arnold Toynbee, President Theodore Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and others. It was a testimonial to the Armenian determination not to be slaughtered like sheep, to their resistance at Musa Dagh, and to the survivors of the atrocities perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

Unfortunately, as we are all well aware, this kind of wholesale slaughter only continued during World War II. In 1941, Winston Churchill called the atrocities and mass killings carried out by the Nazis a crime without a name. Still, no words or phrases seemed adequate to address what befell the Jews during the Holocaust or the Armenians before them. That is, until Raphael Lemkin, a Polish legal scholar and a Jew who had narrowly escaped the Nazis (though most of his family did not) provided the appropriate new word: genocide, compounded from the Greek genos (race) and the Latin cide (killing). Lemkin, who eventually settled in the United States, spent much of his life crusading against the horror he had finally named, which he saw as crime against international law. The concept of declaring what Lemkin described as the destruction of national, religious and racial groups, to be an international crime evolved from his utter repulsion at what had happened to the Armenians and from his own experiences. Indeed, as the scholar and author Samantha Power notes, as early as 1933, Lemkin had drafted a paper that drew attention both to Hitler’s ascent and to the Ottoman slaughter of the Armenians, and proposed a law that would prohibit such destruction, calling for the perpetrators to be punished wherever they were caught, regardless of where the crime was committed. In other words, Power explains, The attempt to wipe out national, ethnic, or religious groups like the Armenians would become an international crime that could be punished anywhere, like slavery and piracy.³

For some, the symbolic implications of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh for the coming Holocaust might have been obvious. However, I did not make that link until, while teaching at the University of Texas, Austin, in the late 1960s, I had learned from Professor Schultz-Berndt that Werfel, a Jew, had chosen the Armenian resistance at Musa Dagh as the topic of his novel for a number of reasons. Not only was he deeply and genuinely moved by what the Armenians had suffered but he also understood the powerful symbolism inherent in the tragic fate of such a large segment of the Armenian population, since Dagh is the Turkish word for mountain and Musa stands for Moses. In addition, even though in reality the Armenian resistance lasted for more than fifty days, Werfel picked the biblical number of forty, highlighting the trials and tribulations, not of Armenians alone, but through them, the fate of the Jews as well. Werfel’s warning was clear: the Armenian tragedy during World War I was only a rehearsal for historical atrocities to come, that Europe would not be immune to such atrocities; that the next time, however, it would have a different cast of victims: the Jews, Poles, other Slavs, Roma, socialists, and other undesirables . . .

In the novel, Enver Pasha, the Minister of War of the Otto ­man Empire, an ally of Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary, claims that the doctrine of national security justifies the deportation of its Armenian population. He asks Dr. Lepsius, the German Lutheran envoy, But let’s suppose that, in other circumstances, she [Germany] found herself with traitors in her midst – Alsace Lorrainers, shall we say, or Poles, or Social Democrats, or Jews – and in far greater number than at present. Would you, Herr Lepsius, not endorse any and every means of freeing your country, which is fighting for its life against a whole world of enemies without, from those within ? . . . Would you consider it so cruel if, for the sake of victory, all dangerous elements in the population were simply to be herded together and sent packing into distant, uninhabited territory? After Lepsius says he would renounce his homeland, Enver Pasha responds, Sad for Germany if many other people think as you do there. A sign that your people lack the strength to enforce its national will relentlessly.⁴ Notably, both this logic and language presage the future rationale of Hitler.

As has been pointed out by many modern scholars, it is truly remarkable to consider how closely The Forty Days of Musa Dagh foreshadows the cataclysm that would befall the Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe at the hands of the Nazis. As historian and scholar Yair Auron writes, The reader of this extraordinary novel will find it difficult to believe that the book was written before the Holocaust.⁵ Indeed, in Germany, the fate of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh itself presaged the devastation to come. It was published to great acclaim in Austria and Switzerland,⁶ but, as Lothar Huber notes in Franz Werfel: An Austrian Writer Reassessed,⁷ In Germany, however, the official reaction against the Armenian epic was a storm of criticism and abuse. Even the most insensitive reader could not have missed the parallels between the ideologies of the Young Turkish nationalism and National Socialism. The Nazi regime burned the book along with other important literary works that it labeled undesirable.

Nonetheless, even as efforts by the Nazis to annihilate the Jewish people were ultimately unsuccessful, thank God, so were their attempts to annihilate Franz Werfel’s masterpiece. Although the Nazis tossed the book on their bonfires and banned it, they could not diminish the role that The Forty Days of Musa Dagh served in fortifying what Yair Auron calls the spirit of its readers, future underground fighters in the ghettos of Germany and Eastern Europe. There is much testimony on this subject preserved in documents that survived the Holocaust. Mordecai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, an activist in the Bialystock Ghetto in Poland, wrote, Only one thing remains for us: to organize collective resistance in the ghetto, at any cost, to let the ghetto be our Musa Dagh, to write a proud chapter on Jewish Bialystok and on our Movement. . . .⁸ Samuel Gringaus, a leader in the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, attested to the strength that so many Jews drew from the book, recalling that [In the ghettos]. . . Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was passed from hand to hand.⁹ Auron reminds us that similar words were used by Inka Wajbort in her memoir of surviving the Sosnowiec Ghetto of Upper Silesia. In the summer of 1941, before she knew that a new Musa Dagh was imminent, Wajbort remembers, The book passed from hand to hand . . . I myself was at Musa Dagh . . . I was one of the Armenians.¹⁰

Perhaps Werfel, too, perceived himself to be one of the Armenians, because The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was not the sum total of the connection he so evidently felt to the men, women and children of Armenia. Another link must be highlighted: in 1912, there was a massive celebration of the fifth-century translation of the Bible into Armenian. Werfel later paid an extraordinary tribute to the translation in a celebrated lecture, in which he noted that the spiritual history of a people begins with its writing.¹¹ Some have speculated that this impressive, nationwide celebration may have contributed to the demise of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian population because, according to numerous observers, Ottoman leaders took notice of the pride, organization, wealth, and religious and national fervor of the Armenians on a scale not seen before.¹²

What is clear, however, is that during World War I, it came as a surprise to many Armenians that Germany and Austria-Hungary, both Christian nations, remained allied with the Otto man Empire in fighting against the French, British, Russians and many others who were fellow Christians. Not only that, both Germany and Austria-Hungary either acquiesced to or looked the other way while the massacre, deportation and genocide of Armenians – also Christians – was carried out by Ottoman decree. In their naiveté, most Armenians did not realize that real politik transcended Christianity, humanitarianism, international law, and even the lessons of history. In that connection, it is sadly revealing to read a recently published account of the protests made by the ambassadors of Germany and Austria-Hungary to their ally, the Ottoman Empire, about their treatment of the Armenian populace, only to learn that their primary concerns were that nothing jeopardize their alliance or impede the completion of the Berlin-Baghdad railway. The fate of the Armenian workers who were crucial to building the rail line and the countless number of wretched deportees overwhelming the capacity of the train cars¹³ were of little, if any, importance.

Franz Werfel, on the other hand, must have believed in the potential for history to inform and confront impending tragedy, even on the unimaginable scale of genocide. That seems evident because even as he was working on The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, he began a lecture tour in which he read passages of the book and explained to his audience that they must not see the story he was writing about as buried back in the era of a different generation but as living, breathing events that were bound to take place again and again if people of faith and integrity did nothing. So, as we embark upon reading this new translation of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, perhaps we must begin to imagine what we can do, as individuals and as a society, to one day break the cycle of applying the final solution of annihilation to ethnic and religious minorities who are seen as problems. Until such a time, we can at least try to put what may at first appear to be the isolated lessons of history into their larger context. To do so requires us to remember events such as those that took place at Musa Dagh. It is no wonder, therefore, that Elie Wiesel gave the title, The Crime of Forgetting to his introduction to the 1986 French edition of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.¹⁴ As Wiesel has declared, Since I live, I must be faithful to memory . . . I must be the emissary of the dead, even though the role is painful.

Let me conclude by citing philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno, who also considered the consequences of obliterating memory, history’s most powerful witness. He warned, Forgetting is inhuman because man’s accumulated suffering is forgotten – the historical trace of things, words, colors and sounds – is always the trace of past suffering. This is why tradition is nowadays confronted with an insoluble contradiction. It is not present and cannot be evoked, but as soon as all tradition is extinguished, inhumanity begins.

Inhumanity has certainly stamped its horrific presence on the world in the form of the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, and the genocidal massacres such as those in Cambodia, Rwanda, and elsewhere that have followed after them. It seems inevitable that these unspeakable events will only serve as rehearsals for more atrocities yet to come if we, too, commit the crime of forgetting. For the sake of future generations, one must hope that we do not.

VARTAN GREGORIAN

President, Carnegie Corporation of New York

---

1 Evoking Genocide: Scholars and Activists Describe the Works That Shaped Their Lives, edited by Adam Jones (Toronto: The Key Publishing House, 2009).

2 Franz Werfel, The Song of Bernadette, trans. Ludwig Lewisohn (1942; reprint, with an introduction by George Weigel, San Francisco: Ignatius Press; 2006).

3 Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

4 This passage is from Book One, Chapter 5, Interlude of the Gods.

5 Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000).

6 In Soviet Armenia, 50,000 copies sold out within a few days.

7 Oxford: Berg Publishers Limited, 1989.

8 Shoah Resource Center, Yad Vashem, The Discussion on Fighting Aims by the Activists of the Bialystok Ghetto, February 27,1943.

9 Samuel Gringaus, Dos Kultur-lebn in Kovner, in Lite, Mendel Sudarski et al, eds. (New York: Jewish-Lithuanian Cultural Society, 1951), 1955.

10 Auron, The Banality of Indifference.

11 Franz Werfel, Festvortrag zur fünfzehnten Jahrhundertfeier der armenischen Bibelübersetzug [Speech for the 1,500th Anniversary of the Bible’s Translation into Armenian], in Zwischen Oben und Unten: Prosa, Tagebücher, Aphorismen, literarische Nachträge [Between Above and Below: Prose, Diary Entries, Aphorisms, and Literary Addenda], ed. Adolf D. Klarmann (Munich: Georg Müller Verlag, 1975), 536-543.

12 In light of these events, it is perhaps ironic to be reminded that the first sentence written in the Armenian alphabet, which was invented by Saint Mesrop, an Armenian monk, was the opening line of Solomon’s Book of Proverbs: To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding.

13 Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2010), 253–254.

14 Franz Werfel, Les 40 jours du Musa-Dagh, trans. Paule Hofer-Bury (1936; reprint, with a preface by Elie Wiesel and an introduction by Pierre Benoît, Paris: Albin Michel, 1986).

Translator’s Note

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh made Franz Werfel (1890-1945) one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial authors after it first appeared in German in 1933. He had worked a miracle for Armenians around the world, taking what might have been a footnote in the history of the First World War – the deportation and mass murder of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian minority – and writing an epic that resonated with the ominous scenario unfolding in Germany as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power. All the signs for the erosion of civil rights, the singling out of a minority for the nation’s problems, and the state-sanctioned violence perpetrated against it were becoming a reality for German Jews and this made reading Musa Dagh as if it were the work of a prophet.

Expectations, that of his readers and Werfel himself, ran high for his next book. But rather than be a prophet a second time, he chose to write the life of a fictional life, a venerated child. It would be unlike the epic Musa Dagh, even though that novel could be read as a saint’s life given the leadership, sacrifice, and mountaintop transfiguration of its estranged hero, Gabriel Bagradian. The public reception of Musa Dagh, however, saw only a War and Peace-length adventure – to read it was like assaulting a mountain – about a guerilla army of Armenian villagers pitted against a Turkish army.

The new novel was to be titled Legends, and it would exhibit more of the mysticism found in Musa Dagh, as though Werfel wished to fly in the face of those critics who found it tangential to that novel’s good fight. Legends would be inspired by Manon Gropius, Werfel’s stepdaughter, who died of polio in April 1935 at the age of eighteen. She would be the muse of her own hagiography – her revenant standing behind him to ensure the truth as he wrote, to dissuade him from lies as he wrote. It would expand on her brief history, her quietude, and qualities to show what had been lost, especially her regard for animals, even distasteful ones, The Intercessoress of Snakes being one of Werfel’s part titles (the other being The Intercessoress of the Dead, which suggests the ambition of the project). He wanted to make Manon – often a peripheral figure in her famous parents’ lives – a girl-saint and a foil for the public’s keen, unhealthy interest in history’s warlords and tyrants. These infamous lives were not for their own sake, but rather to provide a psychological interpretation of everything human and superhuman that, in turn, explained the motivations of Hitler, Mussolini, and other dictators. Yet as much as the world feared such men, Werfel saw that the world feared quiet more in these times of the greatest noise, feared those people who offered some inkling of God’s presence. He felt writers should give this comfort even if just its premonition, something that only can be referred to as a divine mystery even if words would only be an approximation.

[V]ery little of our writing meets with this obligation,... it promotes the churning surface, the pure story. And as if that did not make for enough turbulence already, a forgotten turbulence is now being added, one that satisfies the soul (what a treasonous word) and its need for distraction with biographical spume whipped up in the name of Cæsar, Napoleon, Attila, Tamerlane,...

Werfel, of course, in Musa Dagh, had added to this spume with Enver Pasha, Talaat Bey, and Jemal Pasha, the Young Turks re­sponsible for the atrocities known as the Armenian Genocide. He had given the world three new psychopathologies, anticipating the psychopathic god Hitler, as well as the banality of evil that caught up the Germans. Werfel, too, had given little comfort, in the final chapter of Musa Dagh, which is devoted to the divine mystery. The comfort is a cold one and, from an ironic perspective, it can be seen as self-inflicted literary justice. Legends would make up for the sainthood missed across the nearly one thousand pages of Musa Dagh. But Legends turned out to be a false start that led Werfel to his other famous novel, The Song of Bernadette(1942).

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh began with Werfel’s second journey to the Middle East in the winter of 1930.¹ At the time, he was already a well-established figure in German bookshops, libraries, and literature – even the subject of a biography. He had just published his third major novel, The Pure in Heart (1929), and married his lover, Alma Mahler, Vienna’s legendary consort of genius, the widow of Gustav Mahler and the former wife of the architect Walter Gropius. She had encouraged Werfel, a Czech Jew and an Austrian citizen, to become a true Dichter, which not only meant the expressionist poet of his early career, but to excel in the other genres expected of German literary figures. During the 1920s, his plays (Mirror Man, Goat Song, Juarez and Maximilian, Paul among the Jews) and his novels (Verdi, The Man Who Conquered Death, Class Reunion) established a publishing house and brought him much fame in Europe and North America. He seemed only a book or two from winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in the wake of Thomas Mann. What was also expected of him, as a religious writer and philosopher who had seemingly made the transition from Judaism to Christianity while learning the histories and ideas of virtually every faith from the dawn of history to the present, was his eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism.

After touring the ruins of Karnak, Alma and Werfel traveled on to Palestine and Jerusalem. Unlike his 1925 tour, the assimilated Werfel had not felt estranged from religious Jews and Zionists. There had been a massacre of Jewish settlers the year before, and though he wished for reconciliation with the Arabs, even Werfel, a pacifist, could see the need for Jews to arm themselves. The couple went on to Damascus, accompanied by an armed guard to protect them from bandits. There Werfel, much as he describes in his own words at the beginning of Musa Dagh, toured a carpet factory with Alma.² He saw a number of children working the looms, many of them maimed and crippled. When he asked the factory owner about them, he was told they were Armenian orphans. Their parents had been lost in the massacres, forced deportation marches, and concentration camps of the World War I. These events would not have been a surprise to Werfel. In the years following the war, the atrocities committed against the Armenians surfaced in the news stories, some tied to the revenge shootings of Talaat Bey, Jemal Pasha, and other wartime Turkish leaders, victims of an Armenian revolutionary assassination program with the chilling name of Operation Nemesis.

The haunting El Greco eyes of the children disturbed Alma and Werfel. As they traveled on to Lebanon, Werfel, although sick with fever, had his driver stop so that he could question the Armenian villagers who had returned to the region after the war. He then learned more about the seven villages to the north, in Turkey’s Hatay Province, which occupied the slopes around Musa Dagh – Mount Moses. There, in the summer of 1915, the Armenians disobeyed a government resettlement order. They had heard news of mass arrests of Armenian leaders in Istanbul, of columns of refugees left to die in the Mesopotamian desert, and of murders being committed against their people throughout the Ottoman Empire. Such news fit the pattern of atrocities that had occurred before the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, and it portended worse despite the new regime’s faded promise of ending the old empire’s ethnic divides, which had grown along with the nationalism of both Armenians and Turks during the previous century.

Werfel learned how the village leaders made the decision to resist and how they established an armed camp on Musa Dagh for a long siege. With the Mediterranean Sea at their backs, the Armenians hoped to wait out the war and resist the territorial police and Turkish army long enough to attract the attention of the British and French navies that patrolled the coast from their bases in Egypt and Cyprus. Werfel could not visit the actual site and came no closer than the packet boat that took him and Alma along the same Syrian and Turkish coast to Istanbul. But on the way, the novel that would take place in this landscape began to form.

Back home in Vienna in April 1930, at one of the many parties leading up to Easter, Werfel met his friend, the French ambassador to Austria, Count Bertrand Clauzel. The diplomat was quite familiar with the rescue of the Armenian survivors of Musa Dagh and promised to show Werfel secret French naval and diplomatic communiqués that named the officers and ships involved as well as other important details. Werfel also visited the monastery and library of the Mekhitarists, an Armenian Catholic order based in Venice, who provided more documentation about what had happened on Musa Dagh. Despite his research being interrupted by other books, travels, and lectures, Werfel, with the help of friends, gathered an incredible amount of detail about the regional climate, geography, economy, botany, even the stations of the moon in the sky at given times and other celestial events.

Over the next two years he became fully acquainted with Turkish and Armenian history, culture, nationalism, even cuisine. Werfel studied the history of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Sufi mysticism of Turkey’s Dervishes along with the arcanum of the Ottoman bureaucracy and military He took pains to represent Turks and Armenians with objectivity underlining reminders in his early manuscript: Don’t polemicize against the Turks. Also the Armenians’ hatred of the Turks. Somewhere Enver must be in the right Caution. The Turks cannot appear to be all too dumb and militarily godforsaken. All their actions must be well-founded.³ These latter points concern Turkish public opinion, that European interventionism and colonialism had influenced Ottoman policy against the Armenians, and Turkey’s national pride in its military For this, Werfel had been diligent in researching the battles scenes around Musa Dagh. His accuracy even made Musa Dagh useful to an American military historian who reconstructed Turkish operations around Musa Dagh to prove that it was a counterinsurgency⁴ What is more surprising here is that the novel had been appropriated for a revisionist interpretation that mostly agrees with official Turkish history – which denies the genocide – while still seeing the Ottoman army performing what closely approximated ethnic cleansing in accordance with the military practices of other civilized nations of the period. The Young Turks had only to look to the British strategy of forced resettlement and the first concentration camps of the Boer War in South Africa, or the brutal tactics of German colonial troops in suppressing uprisings in its African territories as well as the United States in the Philippines. Indeed, the American precedent vis-à-vis Turkey’s Armenian policy could be cited further for its long history of forced deportation and resettlement of Native Americans – but there is another reason that Musa Dagh suggests the Little Big Horn. As a boy, Werfel was an avid reader of Karl May’s travel novels set in the American West and the steppes and mountains of the Ottoman Empire. Much of their adventure, color, and struggle resurface in Musa Dagh.

Werfel’s corroboration of the Turkish atrocities came from many German sources and eyewitness accounts – nurses, diplomats, military people, and the like – the most important taken almost verbatim from the writings of the German Protestant missionary Johannes Lepsius and Dikran Andreassian, an Armenian Protestant pastor whose orphanage was forcibly closed by the Turks and its children deported to Mesopotamia. All of this detail and minutiæ would be arranged around what was generally accepted, that during World War I hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenian citizens had been expelled from the heartland of Anatolia and died as a result. Many had been murdered intentionally, especially members of the Armenian intelligentsia. With little countervailing evidence from Turkish sources to offset what Werfel had learned about the events of 1915 and their background – an antagonism for the Ottoman Armenian minority taking form during the nineteenth century not unlike anti-Semitism in Europe – he could only be merciless in portraying the Young Turks as the responsible party for the expulsions, the transit and concentration camps, and the deaths of innocent people. He portrayed their inner circle as having an ultimate goal, well informed by European Social Darwinism such that Talaat Bey uses European words to describe the elimination of an entire race of people, this before the term genocide had been coined for a League of Nations conference. Werfel reminds the reader that Talaat proudly kept a telegraph machine in his office, having been an operator in his youth, and to indicate that a paper trail existed between him and his henchmen in the Ottoman civil service. Yet Werfel’s novelization never shows the actual order being given, it is all intent, sinisterly verbal and eerily prescient of how no order for the Final Solution exists in Hitler’s hand and how a dutiful bureaucracy can be the central nervous system of evil.

Werfel’s notebook from this time, titled Scenes and Plans and dated June 1930, outlines the basic story and characters of the finished novel. One can see that he had gone to great pains already to make the new book historically accurate – and yet it was still not enough for him. Two more years of research and planning were necessary before Werfel felt he was ready to pen the first draft. The notebook also shows that he would rely on what was already an established métier for him: to animate his fiction with people he knew – beginning with himself, his intimates, friends, and enemies. Some even take on more than one role – in keeping with how his novels are as much a theater as the production of his plays. Typically, he kept these identities to himself, but his notebook betrayed one identity. In a list of characters, is a note next to Apothecary Krikor that ties the eccentric Armenian pharmacist-astronomer of the finished novel to a well-known Viennese eccentric, a staretz, a sage of many subjects, the chemist Friedrich Eckstein, a Jewish Theosophist and yogi. He lorded over a table of eager young listeners at the Café Imperial with the same mandarin expression that Krikor wears for his followers among the Armenian teachers in Musa Dagh.

Werfel began his work in July 1932 at Alma's summerhouse in Breitenstein am Semmering. From his writing loft on the upper story, the view of the Rax Mountains of Lower Austria inspired a point of departure – When the time is right in the northern Alps, the cyclamen, rhododendrons, alm roses, and Turkish lily have hardly begun to bloom – for the edenic slopes of Musa Dagh in this first draft. Yet Werfel’s imagination did not fly quite so far from the lectern that served as his writing desk, and The Forty Days of Musa Dagh can be read like an allegory of a summer at Haus Mahler than a fateful summer on the Syrian coast. As Lionel Steiman and other scholars have come to see, Werfel modeled the fully assimilated Gabriel Bagradian on himself, and Bagradian’s French wife Juliette on Alma. Whatever [the novel’s] intrinsic literary value, Steiman notes, it is a document of the life of its author as much as it is about the Armenian genocide.⁵ The afterglow of the couple’s married life is what animates much of Musa Dagh. Werfel also drew from the triadic family relationship that existed between himself, Alma, and her adolescent daughter, Manon Gropius. The latter’s approximate age, her physical appearance, her shyness, and her serenity, the first signs of deeper qualities, even her singing voice and wanting to be a French instructor seem lifted for the character of Iskuhi, Bagradian’s Armenian lover in the novel. Iskuhi’s paralyzed arm may even echo injuries Manon received after a sledding accident in March 1932 – the injured limb being almost a fetish as well as part of Iskuhi’s allure in the novel’s chaste relationship. Just as Manon’s best friend’s father, the Austrian novelist Ernst Lothar, had made his daughter Agathe a character in his work, so Iskuhi seems written as a portrait of Manon in her sixteenth year. If so, Iskuhi is a strange portrait, this character who is an object of desire not only for Bagradian, but also for his son Stephan, Juliette, Iskuhi’s brother Aram, and the orphan girl Sato. And Sato appears to be based on Manon at a younger age, when she was seen as a willful child, infamous for her temper, her spying at Alma’s behest, her going naked, and her rapport with animals, a girl who lived a vagabond life in tow to her mother for most of her life. However, the feral Sato is an exaggeration of her source. She is a damaged child whose indications suggest autism or Tourette syndrome. She almost rises to be a major character in Musa Dagh, yet none of the literature devoted to it examines her, which is surprising, given Werfel’s psychic investment, something familial and autobiographical, comprised of both love and hate like that for sisters, and Werfel had two.

By March 1933, Werfel had completed the first two-thirds of the novel, which Alma read entranced, seeing it as the great work that both imagined it to be. In May 1933, he finished the first draft of Musa Dagh, as if to ensure that it would be ready for the celebration of the 250th anniversary of 1683, when Vienna defeated the last attempt by the Turks to besiege the city, a source of national pride for a country that no longer had its empire yet still considered itself a bulwark against the East. He gave the manuscript to his long-time friend Ernst Polak, who was very close to its gestation since he had been one of Werfel’s chief researchers. Polak objected to the many Jews he recognized in the Armenian characters. Indeed, Werfel had worked in very few real-life Armenians who were at Musa Dagh in 1915 (Dikran Andreassian being the most conspicuous as the model for Pastor Aram Tomasian). Instead, Polak identified people he and Werfel knew from their Prague days, which included Kafka and Max Brod, and from the world (and demimonde) of Vienna’s coffee houses. This reaction surprised Werfel, who loved parody and dealing out literary justice that most readers would not catch. Although Werfel revised Musa Dagh to further disguise the resemblances, he left in much private entertainment. Friedrich Eckstein can still be seen in the polymath Krikor. His friend, the progressive Dr. Altouni, still suggests the possibility that this character is a jab at Werfel’s friend Julius Tandler, Red Vienna’s Social Democratic health minister. And the short, pigeon-bodied schoolteacher Oskanian – Bagradian’s other, is surely another Werfel, who could be self-deprecating about his height and body – the way he makes himself look like a dwarf in a well-known photograph with the composer (and already taller) Alban Berg. His days as a swaggering, unkempt revolutionary were a constant source of embarrassment for him too. Bagradian’s son Stephan is also Werfel at a younger age. Gonzague Maris, who is Greek, a canard for Jewish origins, seems to be Werfel as well, as a member of Alma’s salon who could sing and play piano and steal her from Gropius. Making such connections, however, is a parlor game that only the long dead Werfel and his coterie could play, and one few scholars have tried.⁶ And to Werfel they would have been invisible to the intended audience of Musa Dagh. That audience was the German people and they would be making another kind of connection.

Those who read The Forty Days of Musa Dagh in the 1930s could see the Young Turks of the novel as the Nazis of real life, the Turkish people as the German people, and the Armenians as Europe’s Jews. They saw Werfel as making this unavoidable connection, that it was the point of the novel, its provocation, to the point that many would also lose sight of the Armenian tragedy itself. Over time, this assumption of Werfel’s prescience has been questioned on the grounds that he could not have foreseen the Holocaust given the slow motion of the Final Solution, which came in increments, some imperceptible. Even the putative prophet himself, like others, thought the next German election could remove Hitler from power should he overreach. Yet Werfel did not exist or write in a vacuum. He traveled through Germany, read the newspapers, especially those published in Vienna that nervously focused on Austria’s restive neighbor and the rise of its new savior, this Austrian nonentity now in charge of the hated Prussians! Werfel and Alma – with her income derived in part from the performances of Mahler’s symphonies by German orchestras – both kept a wary eye on the street battles between the Brown Shirts and Communists, and the overt anti-Semitism of Nazi journalists. What happened in Germany affected Werfel’s literary fortunes. It was there that he made and wanted fixed his reputation despite the inroads he had already made on the world stage. And in Germany his many readers lived and voted. Musa Dagh does not antedate the Third Reich, but its conception parallels its development, and its writing seems almost to be a race with the end of Germany’s better nature so as to change the hearts-and-minds of the rank-and-file who have a hand in letting evil happen.

The Nazis considered the Aryan Germans the Staatsvolk, that is, a constituent people, a term used in Musa Dagh where it means those people the Ottoman government saw itself as representing, over the interests and to the exclusion of its minorities. That Werfel wished to reach this target audience is very much given away by the use of words like race and blood and people (Volk), as if he were appropriating the language of the Nazis. As Rachel Kirby posits, although the language of racialism from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is jarring now, [it] is possible that Werfel intentionally included racial vocabulary and assumptions to the extent that he did, so that the reader would make the same gradual transition from acceptance to questioning of the dominant racial discourse.⁷ And this may be the way that Werfel wanted Musa Dagh to influence the good German. He had spent the autumn of 1932 touring Germany and reading to the public the chapter about Lepsius’s encounter with Enver Pasha. That chapter not only showed how many Germans had been involved in the humanitarian attempts to intercede on behalf of the Armenians, it is also the chapter in which Germany’s Jewish problem is insinuated by the Ottoman war god. He was making the connection for the audiences, holding up a mirror for them to see themselves. In some cities he was applauded, but in others his protection had been withdrawn and there were Brown Shirts in the auditoriums interrupting him with their infamous police whistles.⁸

Werfel and Alma had witnessed Hitler and his entourage pass by them in a Breslau hotel lobby in early December 1932. She thought he looked like a frightened boy and asked her husband for his impression. Werfel said word-for-word, Nicht so unsympatisch, not that unpleasant – a remark that surprised Alma, but like her, also based on a fleeting glimpse of a face.⁹ What it may reveal then is Werfel’s subsequent conduct, both obeisant and yet, in full contradiction, setting the stage for a provocation of just such a pleasant fellow, much the way Enver is no more unlikable than a fop and a man-child way over his head. Thus, after Hitler took power in March 1933, Werfel, like Gottfried Benn and others, signed the same declaration of loyalty circulated by the German Academy of Arts and Sciences in the hope of disassociating themselves from politics. As ignoble as this might seem, it shows just how lines were drawn then – and such an act surely had to be weighed with Musa Dagh in mind.

In late February 1933, the Reichstag was heavily damaged by a suspicious fire blamed on the Communists. In March, the Nazi victory at the polls resulted in Hitler becoming chancellor. In April and May, German university students were tossing the works of Jewish authors into huge bonfires. Musa Dagh is filled with great holocausts and clouds of smoke that seem to echo these burnings as well as the anxiety they surely caused Werfel. And yet, he went on with his work as though nothing were wrong, as though it were business as usual like any other book he had written before. He kept revising it in manuscript, and proof pages, which arrived in early October. After days of poring over them, Werfel came down from his atelier while the whole household waited in hushed anticipation, which Alma recorded in a way once reserved for the symphonies of her dead first husband, as if Werfel had written a word opera, which in many ways Musa Dagh is. It is a gigantic accomplishment for a Jew to write such a work at such a time. This accomplishment, however, would not translate into the usual high print run Werfel expected from his publisher Paul Zsolnay, who informed him that fewer copies would be printed than expected since Werfel’s books were still being burned. The likelihood of German consignments going up in flames would be an expensive as well as tragic loss. Disappointed and offended, Werfel nevertheless acted as if he would be the exception, passed over by the Nazis. He even petitioned for membership in the new Reich Association of German Writers, insisting that he was apolitical and a loyal German of sorts with the thinnest of pretexts, being a member of the German minority of Czechoslovakia. Was he this naïve? Alma still called him by the childish pet name she had given him long ago, Franzl She still considered him her charge, almost the sibling of her daughter Manon. Or was he more in control than we know, leveraging for the book all this time, buying time for what he considered his life’s work thus far, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh?

The Germans, the Staatsvolk, had their chance to read Musa Dagh in late November 1933. That it was at all possible was one of the contradictions that prevailed during those first months after Hitler’s rise to power.¹⁰ Books by a burned author such as Werfel were not publicized. Bookstores put no signs in the windows. No advertisements or book reviews appeared in the feuilletons of the newspapers. Some copies of Musa Dagh even had Werfel’s name excised or blotted out so that no one would see the name of its Jewish author. But he was no secret to the Nazis and journalists who had gone over to them. They demanded that Musa Dagh be proscribed. The defamatory parallels between the Young Turks and the National Socialists were obvious. And not only loyal Germans objected to the book. Turkish writers in Germany had also read Musa Dagh and complained about the inaccuracies and the insult to their new nation. And in Austria, the publisher’s gift of a copy to the Turkish ambassador, intended to show that Werfel had also represented Turks in a favorable light, had turned into a public relations disaster.

In February 1934, deeming it a danger to public order, the German government seized all remaining copies of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. The news reached Werfel at a hotel along the Italian Riviera, where he often went to work in the winter months. Writing Alma’s mother Anna Moll in Nice, the wistful son-in-law imagined giving up.

As for me, my mood is not always so good. If anything, you surely know my Musa Dagh is now banned in Germany. As it were, in the so-called prime of life after working nonstop, I stand in my own ruins. In Germany I’m being deleted from the book and from the books of the living, and since I am in the end a German author, I am suspended in empty outer space.

Werfel closed suggesting that his mother-in-law look up his friend Shalom Asch, who had won the Nobel Prize and now lived in the south of France. He mentioned that he looked forward to reading the Yiddish writer’s new book, The Psalm Jew, which Asch sent at the end of April 1934. Not only was it in ­scribed to Werfel, the last line of the book had been revised for him as well: The righteous man is the foundation of the world – surely a tribute to the author of Musa Dagh. But Werfel could not savor it. Manon Gropius had contracted polio during the family’s Easter holiday in Venice and was paralyzed and breathing with the assistance of an oxygen machine. Her illness cast a pall on Werfel while the fate of Musa Dagh took another course outside of Central Europe. American and British publishers had enlisted Geoffrey Dunlop, a British actor turned translator, to render the new novel into English. This news surely met with Werfel’s approval, since Dunlop’s translations of two previous novels had factored in their good reception and sales and lent the impression that he had a better ear for Werfel’s prose than such predecessors as Whittaker Chambers.

Seeing Musa Dagh into English was not an unexpected development for a Werfel novel. Bargaining over a Hollywood film not adapted from the translation, indeed before Dunlop had started, was. During the winter-spring of 1934, Irving Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had already secured the film rights and was having the book translated for screen adaptation based on the German edition’s sales and reviews in the Austrian and Swiss press.¹¹ Such a quick move on the part of one of Hollywood’s most successful producers could be attributed to the success of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Hell’s Angels (1930), which had created a market for epic films about the Great War. The synopsis of Musa Dagh had further buoyed Thalberg’s enthusiasm for the book, convincing him that it had all the right ingredients of love and war to make a box office hit. After weeks of negotiation, in which Werfel won the right to approve any dramatization of Musa Dagh and refused a lower bid, the parties agreed to $20,000 (a sum that undoubtedly factored in the cost of Manon’s long-term care and therapy).

Thalberg had his property. But despite his list of credits going back to 1921, he had no real sense of the Armenian deportations and massacres of 1915 and was ignorant of the incident’s resonance, according to his biographer Mark Vieira. It was MGM’s chief legal counsel, J. Robert Rubin, who warned Louis B. Mayer weeks before the contract was signed (and witnessed by a consular official from the American embassy to Vienna) that making such a picture would be impossible without offending not only the Turks but other races. A lawyer is a risk manager, and Rubin surely knew or could extrapolate the trouble his studio would face. The German text had graphic scenes of the atrocities committed against the Armenians; bringing anything like that to the screen would be considered a threat to the Turkish nation and anything less would be an insult to Armenians, many of whom had escaped Turkish mistreatment as early as the 1890s, when Sultan Abdul Hamid encouraged pogrom-like attacks on Armenian communities throughout the Ottoman Empire. This was ancient history to the president of the new Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and that history had been marginalized as he transformed his country into a modern, secular state that had departed from the violent past and backward reputation of the old Ottoman Empire, from the stereotype of the evil and decadent Turk. The Kemalist government (as well as its successors) denied Armenian accusations of any extermination policy and the so-called damning proof, such as The Memoirs of Naim Bey – a source available to Werfel. Turkish leaders grudgingly admitted that there had been massacres and other excesses, but used the excuse of the fog of war – a guerilla war instigated by Tsarist Russia, which had carefully cultivated its own Armenian minority to project its nationalism on the Ottoman Empire rather than St. Petersburg.

Although Turkey constituted a very small market for MGM films, Mayer undoubtedly saw that diplomacy was needed, as did his son-in-law, David O. Selznick, now in charge of filming the novel. Selznick proposed a script that had one Turkish villain to blame and would have nothing so controversial as to threaten a natural vehicle for the actor William Powell – or better yet, the studio’s new rising star, Clark Gable, who almost brought to life Gabriel Bagradian before Rhett Butler. Over the next few months, Rouben Mamoulian, of Armenian descent, would be courted to direct the film.

In November 1934, the Turkish embassy in the United States became aware of a press report that a major studio intended to film Werfel’s novel. The ambassador, an urbane, cosmopolitan diplomat who spoke perfect English, Mehmet Munir Ertegun, understood the power of the cinema and the threat that The Forty Days of Musa Dagh would pose to Turkey’s new image.¹² He carefully worded his complaints to people he knew well in the State Department, people he could trust to stop such a motion picture.

While a motion picture version of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh attracted Turkish (and even State Department) opposition, Viking Press published the English translation in time for the holiday book season. William Saroyan, of Armenian descent, praised the novel in the Saturday Review, writing that despite its length, its swiftness of movement made it seem all too short. The New York Times printed two reviews during the first week of December. Louis Kronenberger, in the New York Times Book Review noted that Musa Dagh differed markedly from The Magic Mountain and the other eminent novels of recent memory, Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past. Unlike these books, one need only read Musa Dagh once to get a lasting sense of participation in a stirring episode of history. Kronenberger also saw the novel’s filmic qualities: If Hollywood does not mar and mishandle it, it should make a magnificent movie. His colleague, John Chamberlain, described a similar reading experience after living with a huge 800-page novel. Like Kronenberger, he read the book with that hurried, filmic imagination that so many Americans read with, finding the mystical streak, the psychological antipathies, the private relationships, the priestess-like exaltée Iskuhi, and the like to impede an otherwise robust war novel and pleasant way to spend three rainy days of an American December.

More than 34,000 copies sold during the first two weeks and Musa Dagh