Novel
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh
Franz Werfel · 1933
Opening lines
»Wie komme ich hierher?«
“How did I get here?”
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from projekt-gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Spring 1915, at the foot of Musa Dagh, near Antioch. Gabriel Bagradian, an Armenian who has returned after twenty-three years in Paris with his French wife and their son, and a reserve officer of the Ottoman army, realises that the authorities are preparing the deportation of the Armenian villages of the region. Rather than submit, he proposes to his people that they go up the mountain and organise their defence there. Five thousand people follow him.
Context
Its author saw in Damascus, in March 1929, Armenian refugee children, starved and mutilated, who worked in a carpet factory, and decided to write on that basis; he researched at length, wrote the book from July 1932 to March 1933 and reduced the fifty-three-day siege to forty. The novel appeared in two volumes in November 1933 and was banned in Germany three months later, under pressure from the Turkish government, which also caused the film that Hollywood was preparing from it to fail.
Who it is for
More than nine hundred pages, dense, with a great number of characters. The narrative follows a siege of forty days and does not spare the description of the massacres.
Prizes and reception
A great international success, regarded as a major literary testimony on the Armenian genocide; banned in Germany as early as 1934.
Sources for this page 9
The pages consulted to check this page.