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Franz Werfel’s novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, originally published in German in 1933, is not just as a novel about systematic violations of human rights, but above all as a political intervention, in the form of a novel, on behalf of the fundamental rights of a certain group of human beings – in this case, the Armenians. The genocide of the Armenians at the hands of the fading Ottoman Empire during the First World War forms the historical backdrop to the novel. According to estimates by the historian Michael Mann, between 1.2 and 1.4 million Armenians were killed in 1915 and 1916 – that is, probably two thirds of the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire at the time (see Mann 2005, p. 140).113 Ideological rationales included the Turkish rulers’ widespread fear that the Armenian population might collaborate with Russia, Turkey’s wartime enemy (Mann 2005, p. 143). Economic motives also played a role; for example, the expropriation of the (partly prosperous) Armenians served to create a Muslim economic elite loyal to the Young Turks (see Adanir and Kaiser 2000, p. 283). Finally, the quest for a “unifying patriotism” was seen as essential for holding together the remains of the crumbling multiethnic Ottoman Empire (Anderson 2008). The Armenian genocide was not only “successful” in that there are almost no Armenians left in Turkey today; its “success” has been underscored by the fact that the mass murder has been consistently denied by all Turkish governments from 1919 to this day and only received little attention abroad. “As time passed, it became the ‘forgotten genocide’,” sums up Edward Minasian (Minasian 2007, p. xxx). According to accounts of what inspired the novel, Werfel came across the story of the Armenians in 1929 while traveling in Syria. During a visit to a carpet factory, he and his wife saw “emaciated children with El Greco faces and enormous eyes” who, they were told, were “the children of Armenians killed off by the Turks” (Mahler Werfel 1958, p. 220). In a note prefacing The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, Werfel states that it was the “miserable sight of some maimed and famished-looking refugee children” that gave him “the final impulse to snatch from the Hades of all that was, this incomprehensible destiny of the Armenian nation” (Werfel 1934, p. v). For Werfel, the task of the literary text – following a tradition that dates back to classical antiquity – derives from its ability to preserve

The Aesthetics of Human Rights in Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh