Taner Akçam Teaches ‘Genocide 101’ in Germany

‘Armenian Genocide 101’

The highpoint of Akçam’s visit was undoubtedly his session with German students, in which I also participated. They came from two prestigious Gymnasien, high-school level institutions for study of the humanities and natural sciences. Students in German schools receive instruction in Holocaust studies but, with the exception of one federal state, they do not learn about the Armenian Genocide in their history classes. These two classes had prepared for their special workshop by reading background material and discussing it with their teachers. The visiting professor decided to treat them to an introductory course, “Armenian Genocide 101.” With the aid of a huge map of Ottoman Turkey, which showed the deportation routes and concentration camps, he summarized the phases of the genocide, from the “re-settlement” to the extermination. He placed special emphasis on the mathematical precision with which the operation was organized and executed, explaining how Armenians would be deported, and could not make up more than 5-10 percent, and how Anatolia, with its massive Armenian population, was to be emptied, also in light of the Russia factor. Referring to documents from the Office of Statistics, he cited the figure of 180,000 Armenians to be left. When, after the removal of 1.3 million, it appeared that a half million still survived, they were subjected to killing in the second phase, to reach the desired number.

Throughout the discussion, comparisons to the Holocaust were made — from the Nazis’ “Eastern Plan” to their pursuit of “Lebensraum” for a purely German (or “Aryan”) population. Here he noted that in the Armenian case one difference concerned religion. Those who converted to Islam could save their lives (until he number became too large), whereas in the Holocaust this was not the case. Regarding the perspectives for Genocide recognition, both Rolf Hosfeld, scientific director of the Lepsiushaus, and Akçam pointed out the importance of the military-strategic context. Had Nazi Germany won the war, and a Nazi-successor elite established post-war Germany, the attitude towards the Holocaust would have been different. But Germany was occupied, the Nuremburg trials took place. Similarly, in Turkey after it lost the war and was under occupation, trials against the CUP leaders responsible for the massacres took place. However, following Atatürk’s later military victories, the scene changed. Thus, the need for a new generation in Turkey to assume leadership and responsibility for facing the past and establishing justice. He noted several encouraging steps in this direction on the part of the current government, which broke the continuity of the elites when it assumed power over a decade ago; for example, Prime Minister Erdogan’s apology for the Dersim massacres of Kurds.

The students listened in fascination to his brief account of his own life in Turkey. As a student leader he had written about the Kurds and paid for it with a 9-year prison sentence. After one year, he managed with co-prisoners to break out of prison and flee to Germany, where he was again arrested, because he carried a false passport, and held until Amnesty International succeeded in freeing him. It was while working with a social research center in Hamburg on a project about “universalizing Nuremburg” that he first started reading about the Armenians. In Turkey, he had had no idea of what had happened. That was the beginning of his work as the leading Turkish researcher of the genocide. Following up on this biographical profile, I sketched out my family background, to give an example of how individual Armenians — my parents — experienced the genocide and survived. With the aid of pictures of former Armenian villages in eastern Anatolia, I showed how the denial policy has involved attempts to eradicate traces of the culture and civilization of the Armenians on the soil of current-day Turkey.

National Identity or Nationalism?

In a final session, a former school director Ulrich Rosenau moderated discussion, drawing the lessons of the Genocide for the present. Here students shared their views of racism, as they have experienced it against non-ethnic German immigrants, for example, and also in the wider European Union context, with reference to rightwing extremist movements in some eastern European countries. They asked what the role of the Turkish population had been during the Genocide and heard how the governing CUP leaders in Ottoman mobilized their base with religious propaganda against the “infidels,” while providing economic incentives to plunder the Armenians. As in the Holocaust, it was crucial to dehumanize the targeted victim population, identifying them as foreign, alien, tumors to be removed. He provided interesting insights from his own experience as a Turk in Germany, where he did experience discrimination, and in America, where he has not. This prompted reflection on the nature of national identities: is the identity of a nation its ethnicity? Or are citizens in the US, for instance, first Americans, and then Armenians, Italians, Hispanics, etc.? He also remarked that in the case of the US, it has been possible to face the implications of slavery and the fate of Native Americans, without eradicating the positive contributions of the founding fathers.