Our deep thanks to Michael and Yasemine for their help, which gave impetus and encouragement to the production of this Dossier.
© Pascaline Marre
1At different levels, a dialog of voices is making itself heard, not only between Turkish and Armenian intellectuals, writers, and artists, but also between Turkish civil society and its Armenian counterpart. We tend too much to associate negation of the Armenian genocide with Turkish society as a whole and, consequently, to stigmatize the latter. It’s surprising we still haven’t ascertained the extent of the negative effects caused by stigmatizing a population or a nation, which generally (and it’s unfortunately bound to happen) responds mimetically to the evil image we make of it.
2“All Turks are negationists!” The harmfulness of such utterances heightens the feeling of isolation of those it targets. It exacerbates their paranoiac potential, and, at the same time, reinforces the position of those who produce it. This is less a case of rivalry than of blockage between sides declared as opposing and forced into this Manichaean adversity. But, contrary to the picture painted too often by the European media, a trend toward critical awareness has started in Turkey. Will the country be given enough leeway to go forward? To what degree do its governments suffer from not having full control of the past? From the outside, will we be sensitive enough to this potential so as to encourage it rather than risk its being snuffed out?
3Fondapol (http://www.fondapol.org), in partnership with the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, conducted a wide-ranging poll on the state of memories of the 20th century, under the name Future Memories. For this remarkable initiative, it polled 31,172 young people age 16 to 29, in 24 languages and in 31 countries. In response to the question “Do you think we can speak of genocide regarding the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915?”, 33% of the Turks surveyed answered “Yes.” The study’s commentary rightly highlights that this is an encouraging figure, given the situation. We could ask ourselves how many Europeans would have imagined such a percentage.
4We must also add, for those not aware, that in Turkey we can find an Armenian community, Armenian newspapers, as well as citizens of Turkish origin who support recognition of past crimes – or who even campaign for it, despite the regular pressure and violence some of them may suffer (the former from the government, the latter from ultranationalists). The assassination of Hrant Dink on 19 January 2007 was a tragic example that made many Turkish citizens realize the situation.
5This realization – or level thereof, as it varies and does not necessarily require simple acceptance of the word “genocide” (Insel & Marian 2009) – is marked by a clear-cut and harsh split with Turkey’s successive governments and largest political parties. These unanimously refuse to recognize not only the scale of both the premeditation and the organization of the massacres that targeted Armenians of all ages and of both sexes indifferently, but, as a consequence thereof, they refuse the label “genocide”, which is the most serious one in terms of political crimes. Internationally, this leads to flagrant opposition from many Western governments, which approve of this description in the media but find themselves in an uncomfortable position when they include Turkey, as is often the case, among their economic and geostrategic partners.
6And then there are the communities, made up of members of the diasporas, who share affinities and come together. The process by which the protagonists of Armenian memory speak out is generally in relation with such communities. From the countries where they are established, they emit many signals, as the memory of the massacres is embedded in their memory of exile (Altounian 2014). For example, the aim of the film The Cut (2014) by the German-Turkish director Fatih Akın, is to tell us, through the journey of a father looking for his daughters who escaped all the way to the heart of the United States, that the marks of the crimes committed against the Armenians in 1915 are borne by and within an experience that is simultaneously one of wandering and quest. The layered, personal and community memory that arises from this experience provides the disaster of bloody expulsion with, if not a framework for enunciation, a cultural and human basis for supporting its transmission.
7In the last thirty years or so, this transmission has been recognized as a memory in the public space. It has benefited from circumstances much more favorable than previously to the visibility and readability of past violence against groups (Mesnard 2014, 99-104). For example, publications, monuments, museums, exhibitions, public declarations and events (meetings, symposiums, debates, conferences), and the mobilization of the media provide information on what happened. The “Armenian genocide” has a topicality that previously existed only among a limited circle. This weighs heavily in public opinion, and all the more so because from the end of the 1990s public construction of the memory of the Armenian genocide has been carried out in tune with the memory of the Holocaust, with many of its actors providing their intellectual support and their experience to the memory initiatives of the Armenian diaspora.
81915-2015. No one can ignore the opportunity represented by this centenary, even though the commemorations linked to World War I, the twentieth anniversary of the Tutsi genocide, and the seventieth anniversary of the victory over Nazism all suggest that the tone of the present is already deeply imbued with the violence of the twentieth century. It’s as if the twenty-first century, still in its early years, was obliged to declare deep links with the previous century through these occasions and, above all, not to cut ties with them.
9So, there we have it: 1915-2015. Testimony Between History and Memory is also taking advantage of this centenary to present a Dossier on... what issues exactly?
10This Dossier has not been designed to meet expectations for historical explanations. Many works and events are going to try to satisfy these. We have sought to take on a radically different perspective by dealing with questions of memory based on their contemporary issues, as much in Turkish society as in transnational arts. And while historians are mentioned in the following pages, it is not as representatives of their discipline. Historiography is a major branch of knowledge of our era, and we support the institution. Nonetheless, it is also true that neither violence nor memory are its preserve, even though at times we would easily be led to believe so in French-speaking countries.
11This is why we have invited contributors from other horizons. Other horizons because another of our concerns has been to adopt a multi-perspective approach by crossing points of view of different academic, national, and community origins. In a way, this issue has sought to be post-commemorative, so as to open up a new “memory laboratory” even broader than those that fuel the column that usually ends our revue. We call this a “memory laboratory” because what is emerging in the positive spiral of relationships between the Armenian memories coming from Turkey, the diasporas, or the Republic of Armenia on the one hand and the Turkish national and community (especially that of immigrant Turks in Germany) memories on the other represents exceptional material for discovery, interpretation, and analysis of the multiple circulation of pasts. This material concerns the way the real is imagined as much as the real itself, calling up not only multicultural and postcolonial issues, but also what Michael Rothberg calls multidirectional memories (2009, 2014).
12Back to our Dossier... First, Uğur Ümit Üngör, as an archeologist of memories bequeathed by witnesses (in the sense of bystanders) to their children, gives an account of his work. He touches on an aspect that has hardly been researched: oral accounts, which he was able to gather in the field. His research on what he calls social memory has become essential reading on the massacres and their traces in contemporary Turkish society, whose image he helps to put in a better light by detaching it from the governing political authorities.
13The following article, by Seyhan Bayraktar, in a way takes Uğur Ümit Üngör’s reflections further, by refocusing them on the activist issues surrounding the construction of the memory of the Armenian genocide in Turkey. This way, we can better perceive the stances of progressive Turks and the consequences, generally considered negative, of the attacks committed by ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) in the 1980s. After this period, during which it was believed that demands for recognition could be met via the myth of so-called direct action, many initiatives for reconciliation were created, like that of WATS (Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship of the University of Michigan), founded in 2000. These weakened the negationist discourse, without the need for any law to penalize it.
14Recognition stumbles over the one word “genocide” and all it implies in and by its definition. The Turkish governments have never denied that there were massacres on a breathtaking scale. Disagreement occurs regarding the planning and ideological responsibilities that the governments from the 1920s to the present have concealed. This negationism is thus different from that of the Holocaust or that of the genocide of the Tutsis. Nonetheless, society is undergoing changes, even among the most sensitive branch of senior civil servants: the judicial authorities. With this regard, allow me to recount a short, true story.
15Mehmet Aksoy, one of Turkey’s most famous sculptors, built one of his monumental works, Monument for humanity, in Kars, in the north of Turkey. It showed two human beings approaching one another in a gesture of reconciliation. The statue was thirty meters tall and could be seen from the other side of the border, in the Republic of Armenia. After a visit to the site, the Islamist-conservative prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the destruction of what he considered to be an insult to the state. Despite mobilization to save the statue, it was reduced to dust in 2011. But the artist didn’t give up; he began legal proceedings against Erdogan. It was recently reported (‘Beleidigung bestätigt’, Tageszeitung, 6 March 2015) that he was symbolically condemned to pay 3500 euros in damages. This would indicate that things are changing: the seismograph readings are jumping about, and it is truly difficult from the outside to grasp the trends occurring in Turkish society.
16This is why we had to let Sila Cehreli speak out. Lecturer at Marmara University (Istanbul), not only is she faced with all these issues, but she works on them directly in her work in teaching and research. Her position and career are all the more remarkable because she has made a name for herself in France as a pioneer of historiography of the Nazi death camps in Poland (Cehreli 2013). She can thus give an account of the situation in her country from an internal and external point of view (born in Germany, specialist of the Holocaust in France, and focusing her attention on Turkey’s Armenian community).
17Let us look at the arts next. Michael Hoffmann’s contribution concerns Germany seen as a multicultural country. He presents the main works of writer Zafer Şenocak and filmmaker Fatih Akın, both Germans of Turkish origin. Each in his way seeks to get closer to this other memory – the mark or the Armenian “ghost” (Marchand & Perrier 2013) – that reminds them not only of their own identity of origin and of what haunts its history, but also how that other genocide, that of the Jews, is dealt with in terms of memory by the German society in which they were raised and whose nationality they possess. Multiple memory relationships with the past become even heavier with meaning when we consider that possible involvement in the Armenian genocide by Germany, the historical ally of first the Ottoman Empire and then Turkey, is currently being investigated by historians, in particular journalist Jürgen Gottschlich (2015).
18The question of what can be represented with regard to these massacres, which were perpetrated largely during the forced deportations towards the Syrian desert, is posed by the fictional choice adopted by Fatih Akın. Atom Egoyan had already taken a chance at it with his Ararat (2002), whose reception was not equal to the power it had of asking questions and to the intelligence of its composition. Ararat’s strength lies in several frame narratives that present the issue of transmission, of the impossible mourning that leads to suicide, and the realistic attempt – by a film within a film – to represent the genocide. Marie-Aude Baronian, a specialist of Egoyan (Baronian 2013), makes his film a reference point when presenting two artists, Gariné Torossian and Mekhitar Garabedian, and she applies her concept of “textured memory form” to them, thereby taking up the ancestral fabric design culture of the Armenians.
19After Hoffmann and Baronian, we have David Kazanjian, who has also studied artists’ works to support what can be interpreted as a hypothesis on the possibility of creating kinship. According to him, the term “reconciliation” is not strong enough and is too conventional to describe what could be achieved. How can such kinship be created? How can we imagine kinship that can overcome such violence, which has dragged on due to the intransigence of a state that categorically refuses the strongest qualification of the crimes attributed to it? This kinship would indeed be unprecedented, even if we think of post-war Jewish-German relations (for which, when we look at them closely, cannot be compared).
20Kazanjian does not claim to be alone in answering the question posed by this hypothesis. To back it up, he mentions two outstanding works: “Self-Portrait as an Ottoman Woman” by Aikatarini Gegisian and a collaboration between Nina Katchadourian and Ahmet Ögüt called “AH-HA”. As with the previous works commented by Michael Hofmann and Marie-Aude Baronian, the artists turn out to be actors less of memory than of realization. The real, here in relation with the past, asserts itself as an event through the artistic event that becomes its mediator. It thereby avoids the conventions of official discourse or even becomes intolerable to it, as in the previously mentioned story of the sculptor, prime minster, and judge.
21This Dossier grants considerable importance to image – not just image as illustration, nor images whose aim is to shock, nor the imaginable image. Because whereas we can represent everything, we can’t imagine everything. This is the reason why the photos by Pascaline Marre, which are neither visual discourses nor clichés, seemed to us to be the only ones to give the remains that are still left the feeling of an “almost nothing” even more terrifying than if they had all disappeared.
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22The ideal of kinship developed by David Kazanjian reflects the different approaches of social memory and memory construction developed respectively by Uğur Ümit Üngör and Seyhan Bayraktar in the articles that open this Dossier. These are non-institutional memories that seek to be made visible, but without showing themselves and even less making a show of themselves. These memories develop independently from political authorities (which are thus free to oppose them), and they also maintain a distance from memory institutions. While based on the past, they are not exclusively focused on it.
23If memory must indeed work so that crimes are recognized on the scale to which they were committed, it cannot stop the passage of time on one shocking freeze frame. That’s why the elements that come into play with this idea of kinship (the expression of which we set great store by), encourage memory to consider dissolving for and into the (re)activation of relationships among the various groups concerned.
24This trend goes much further than the simple and idealistic rediscovery of the multiculturalism of certain eras of the Ottoman Empire (as was the case under the Habsburg reign) and seems to seek to create new forms of imagined communities (Anderson 1983) that go beyond being rooted in a national identity with the identity politics excesses that brew there, so that identity as an aim (or as origin) is replaced by the circulation of identities such as multiple languages that hence become places of exchange, mixture and translation of a postmonolingual condition (Yildiz 2012). This is how we can discover this aspect of memory often ignored by its too headstrong official representations: this aspect that makes itself a crossing point or a zone where identities pass in transit and transmute, and not just blend, justify themselves, and legitimize themselves.