History Tilt

In 1915 over a million Armenians were tortured, murdered and displaced from their villages and homes in the Ottoman Empire. Franz Werfel wrote about these events in his revolutionary 1933 novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which was immediately banned by the Nazis. The book describes the misery of the persecution and extermination of the Armenians, as well as the exception, the miracle: the successful resistance at Musa Dagh, Mountain of Moses. 5,000 villagers entrench themselves, defend themselves against the attacks of the Young Turk army and, in the end, are rescued from their hopeless situation by French warships. 100 years after the Armenian genocide, Hans-Werner Kroesinger brings this story to the stage in a collage with documentary material on Germany's role and the structural organisation of the mass murder. What can a seemingly old story tell us about dealing with history today?