the forty days of musa dagh

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1934)

Franz Werfel, transl. from German by Geoffrey Dunlop

rating good

type fiction e-book

2026/06/09 An epic novel portraying a tragic and miraculous true saga that took place during World War II’s Armenian Genocide… As I say so often, this book revealed to me another major event I’d never heard of in a part of the world I don’t think of much. The story of the group of Armenians who evaded persecution by the Ottomans by fleeing to the mountain Musa Dagh (for— you guessed it— forty days) emphasized both the incredible resilience and frailty of humans alike; and it revealed how facing death and injustice can lead us to both tear each other apart and come together to overcome the odds. I don’t feel like I can fairly evaluate how much I liked the book overall, simply because I read it sporadically over the course of several years, and therefore was often somewhat lost and disoriented… but the writing was as poetic and brutal as the story, and it’ll stay with me for awhile.

"... he had still not turned his listening gaze away from the villa ..."
"An empire was to be grounded in which two races should live at peace side by side and not dishonor each other."
antediluvian — nice word!
"When a human being comes back to any former place of contemplation an inner life, those spirits which he, the returned, once cherished and left there return and eagerly posses him."
"These are two Europes. The Germans need the Turkish government more than it needs them. And the others can't help us."
"'If my government,' he said very distinctly, 'behaved unjustly, unlawfully, inhumanely' ('in an un-Christian way' was the expression on the tip of his tongue) 'to our fellow countrymen of a difference race, a different persuasion, I should clear out of Germany at once and go to America.'
"Better perish physically in Turkey than spiritually in Russia."
"Let's admit, Excellency, that craftsmanship, trade, and peasant industry, which in the interior are almost exclusively Armenian, could be taken over by Turks -- who is to replace all the numerous Armenian doctors, trained in the best universities in Europe, who care for their Osmanli patients with the same skill as for their own people? Who's to replace all the engineers, all the solicitors, all the export traders, whose work so indefatigably drives the country forward?"
"I agree that among Armenians one finds an alarming proportion of intelligence."
"'You want to found a new empire, Excellency. But the corpse of the Armenian people will be beneath its foundations. Can that bring you prosperity? Could no more peaceful way be chosen, even now?' ... 'There can be no peace,' he said, 'between human beings and plague germs.'"
"But any man who goes into politics must possess two special qualifications: first, a certain levity, or if you like, indifference to death -- it comes to the same thing; and secondly, the unshakable belief in his own decisions, once they are taken."
"What Herr Lepsius perceived was that arctic mask of the human being who 'has overcome all sentimentality' -- the mask of a human mind which has got beyond guilt and all its qualms, the strange, almost innocent nad'veté of utter godlessness. And what force it had, that a man could not hate it!"
"Round Enver's delicate, silky features, his people saw a messianic aura. He was the man sent by God, who should re-erect the empire of Osman, Bayazid, Suleiman."
"These Germans are only afraid of the odium of being made partly responsible."
"In the autumn I shall be able to say with perfect candor to all these people: 'La question arménienne n'existe pas.'"
"Perhaps, sub rosa, ..." --> literally, "under the rose;" describes something done in secret or behind closed doors
"... whereas these cultured ones, the highly progressive urban middle class, stood to a man behind Enver Pasha's Armenian policy, the simple Turk, peasant or town proletarian, felt differently."
"And if you men are so cowardly that you'd rather stay on here and be slaughtered, we women alone will arm ourselves and go up on Musa Dagh with Gabriel Bagradian."
"It's necessary to be careful in making these people see the obvious."
"The power of any warrior race is dependent on magic belief in invincibility, and the morale engendered by it."
"Thus did one fourteen-year-old schoolboy, with five cartridges, avenge the million-fold decimation of his race upon harmless peasants forced into arms -- upon the wrong people, as it always the case in war revenge."
"The ancient myth of supernatural powers behind the Armenians had found its completest confirmation."
"The licking flames of this huge mountain conflagration crept nearer with overweening playfulness. These flames seemed to rouse the sleepers; they raised them up from underneath, so that the dead, with a stiff jerk of terror, sat bolt upright, before their bodies started crackling, and they sank back into the cleansing holocaust. From hour to hour the fire increased, spreading far and wide across the Damlayik, to north and south. It halted only at the barren stone slopes of that incline which falls sheer from the South Bastion, while a rocky inlet protected the North Saddle against it. The green slopes of this mountain blessed with many springs, this miracle of the Syrian coast, triumphed once again with flaming banners, till at last nothing was left to devour but a strong obstacle field of glowing embers. Thus did Musa Dagh armor with fire, with red-glittering debris, her weary sons, lost in their gulf of sleep, unaware that for some time now they need fear no more from their pursuers. None realized how a friendly wind kept danger helpfully off the Town Enclosure, driving sparks and tongues of flame downhill. The villagers and the decads slumbered on till late afternoon -- only then did the Council meet to resolve that every imperiled point must be fully cleared of wood and undergrowth. This was a new and exhausting task."
"But planning and reflection were never her strong points. Either she evoked transient images, or would start at the sudden flash of a perception. These perceptions and images had no need at all of the assistance of anything like conscious understanding. They worked blindly towards an aim: just as they could join up threads, let them drop, take them up again, and so spread a web of planned revenge, of which their mistress was almost unaware."
"Doesn't Nietzsche say: 'What totters, ought it not to be thrust down?'"
"The sun is arrogant and aggressive, the moon mild and full of peace. The Türbedar speaks harsh words, but not to you, who are our guest."
"Anyone with a fixed idea has the chance of infecting other people with it, even in big crowds.That is the secret of successful political propaganda, which obtains its effects by the simplest means: a limited, but telling, vocabulary, a demoniacally penetrating voice."
"Gabriel answered him so softly that, no doubt, he did not understand. 'No one who stands where I stand can begin again from the beginning.'"