Mass Media and the Genocide of the Armenians

One Hundred Years of Uncertain Representation

Stefanie Kappler, Sylvia Kasparian, Richard Godin, Joceline Chabot, Stefanie Kappler, Sylvia Kasparian, Richard Godin, Joceline Chabot

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137564023
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The role of the mass media in genocide is multifaceted with respect to the disclosure and flow of information. This volume investigates questions of responsibility, denial, victimisation and marginalisation through an analysis of the media representations of the Armenian genocide in different national contexts.

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Genocide and the Arts: Creativity, Morality and the Representation of Traumatic Experience

Adam Muller

Introduction

In their introduction to this timely volume of essays, the editors usefully foreground the ways in which representations contribute to shaping social reality, and by extension our understanding of and commitment to the moral norms and political practices animating, as well as sustaining, our sense of the way things are now and have been in the past. It is, in other words, via our representational languages and practices that we derive the crucial information needed to make sense of ourselves, others, and the world. This was the intuition underpinning philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s intuition in his Tractatus that “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein, 1961). It is also an idea implicit in the comparison provided here by Joceline Chabot, Richard Godin, and Sylvia Kasparian of Canadian media coverage of the Armenian Genocide and atrocities committed by German troops in Belgium and France during the First World War. While these authors show how successful the press was at conveying useful information about the Armenian Genocide to the Canadian public, like me they remain finally doubtful of the efficacy of words when tasked with describing an attempted human annihilation. Notwithstanding the importance of documenting and explaining atrocious human experiences, we need to be constantly aware of what the Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander once termed the “limits of representation” (Friedlander, 1992). Such awareness obliges us to acknowledge the deep contingency of our languages, genres, and media: their tendency to alter and adapt over time in response to a wide variety of concerns often extrinsic to the circumstances under description.

This contingency is addressed by nearly all of the contributors to this volume. Tessa Hoffman, for example, shows how German press coverage of Ottoman Turkish atrocities was muted as a consequence of what were broadly acknowledged at the time to be supervening national military and economic imperatives. Benedetta Guerzoni explains the media’s construction of a feminized “ravished” Armenia, both during and after the genocide, as a primary consequence of the need to channel the American public’s moral outrage into a willingness to provide substantial humanitarian assistance. Mobilizing this support in Russia was likewise the purpose of the weekly periodical Armyansky Vestnik discussed by Louisine Abrahamyan in her chapter. Abrahamyan shows how the periodical worked to construct an idea of Western Armenian refugees as deserving of assistance given both their barbaric treatment by the Ottoman Turks and the precariousness of their subsequent displacement and relocation. She explains the particular care taken by Armyansky Vestnik’s editors and contributors to provide empirical support for claims about suffering, creating solid rationalizations (and thus a logic) for the distribution of humanitarian resources. Refugees also figured prominently in the Polish press outlets analyzed by Dominika Maria Macios. However, unlike the fact-heavy representational strategy evident in Armyansky Vestnik, the Poles typically opted for more overtly sentimental readings of the Armenians’ plight, viewing them as likewise historically citizens of a “nation without territory” and, particularly after the treaties at Versailles and Sèvres, geopolitical fellow travelers.

What these accounts rightly speak to is the profoundly complicated and evolving relationship between representations of mass violence and the individuals and experiences they depict. My own primarily theoretical work is centrally concerned with these complications, though in a somewhat different way. I have a particular interest in the aesthetic modes and strategies through which the creative imagination achieves interpretive purchase on experiences of mass violence, especially genocide. My research strives to make sense of the way artists – primarily visual artists but also writers, poets, and the like – work to imagine and in some way breathe life into events the intensity and horror of which quite literally beggar reason. I wish to use this chapter to spell out some of the main difficulties my work confronts. I will take particular care to explain what it is about genocide and its attendant miseries that makes representational praxis so hard, and at the same time also vitally necessary. Central to my discussion will be consideration of the overwhelming character of experiences of extreme violence, their tendency to overload the cognitive and affective resources through which human beings – victims, survivors, and secondary witnesses alike – confront traumatic adversity and struggle in various ways to work through it.

There are two aspects of this overloading that interest me. The first is epistemological, namely the difficulty of conceiving of the intense brutality and force of the events experienced by victims of mass violence and atrocity. This is actually a difficulty faced first by victims and then by those trying subsequently to represent victims’ personal and collective experiences. The second aspect is moral, and concerns the need we have, notwithstanding their inaccessibility, to find some way to render key features of atrocious experiences and make them knowable, however imperfectly. This rendering is required in order for secondary witnesses to empathize with victims of mass violence, and via this empathetic identification to orient and ground moral judgments and related retributive and reconciliatory acts. Drawing on David Hume, Martin Hoffman rightly notes that “moral judgment is based on feelings of satisfaction, pain, uneasiness, or disgust that result from the observer’s empathy with the feelings of the person whose action is being appraised and with the feelings of those who are affected by this action. […] Empathy may thus guide the moral judgments we make about others” (Hoffman, 1994). Both the epistemological and moral aspects of the experience of mass violence have generated a considerable secondary literature, the bulk of it devoted to reflection on the Holocaust and its legacies. I will survey some of this literature in what follows, trying in the process to isolate its significance for our understanding of representations of the Armenian Genocide.

Contending with “Difficult” Knowledge

What does it mean to “work through” the experience of genocidal violence? There seem at least two distinct sets of processes encompassed by this idea, one psychological the other aesthetic, though these remain related in virtue of the dependence of both on representation. As Holocaust survivor Jean Améry knew all too well, experiences of extreme suffering place extraordinary demands on the languages available to victims forced to contend with them, mentally as well as discursively. Writing of his torture at the hands of the Gestapo, Améry observes that “It would be totally senseless to try and describe here the pain that was inflicted on me. […] One comparison would only stand for the other, and in the end we would be hoaxed by turn on the hopeless merry-go-round of figurative speech. The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say” (Améry, 1986: 33). For Améry, the wartime suffering he endured resists representation, by language or anything else. His pain quite literally cannot be expressed, only felt in the moment of its experience. It therefore remains in some important sense mnemonically inaccessible, to him as well as to his audience.

The image of the merry-go-round is significant here. It signals Améry’s sense that the extreme effects of violent torture are knowable by victims only indirectly, via loose representations of felt pain and anguish that remain irreducibly approximate – gestures toward other gestures toward a suffering that can be shared only through metaphors the meaning of which must be anything but stable. The looseness of these metaphors is in part a function of their circularity, which arises from their lack of any real purchase on the events they are intended to depict. What figurative language of this kind points to is not so much the Ding an sich of its referent, in this case traumatic experience, rather it gestures toward ideas and sense data evoked by experiences which are likewise comprehensible only through the use of more figurative language. Améry’s insight is Nietzschean. In his essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche argues more broadly that all truth claims are distorted by language, and that truth itself is no more than “A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, [and] anthropomorphisms” (Nietzsche, 2001: 878). For Nietzsche, feelings are all that can be trusted since they arise from our interactions with the (real) world. Words do nothing but mislead since they do nothing but point to other words (and thus language and its man-made conventions). This idea that representation serves to obscure rather than to reveal things as they really are is expressed somewhat more poetically (and neatly) by Martin Heidegger, who observes that “The calling here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there” (Heidegger, 2001: 196).

In part it is this alienated condition – the remoteness of traumatic events from the preconditions for their shared understanding, most especially representational language, broadly conceived – that marks Améry’s experience as traumatic. This follows if we share some version of Cathy Caruth’s influential understanding of trauma, which she defines as “unclaimed experience.” For Caruth, “Traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimensions of suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it, that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness” (Caruth, 1997: 208). Trauma on this view is characterized by latency and delayed uptake, both of which severely complicate its representation. The memory of traumatic experience lies beneath the membrane separating consciousness from the unconscious, and so remains difficult to acknowledge explicitly: to probe, specify, and share. It becomes available to the victim only through symptoms (sleeplessness, angry outbursts, depression, etc.) that themselves are or over time become traumatic. This “secondary” traumatization creates a kind of circle, what Patrick Duggan and Mick Wallis call a “mise-en-abyme in which the symptom is a representation or rehearsal of the original event but at the same time itself a traumatic event” (Duggan & Wallis, 2011: 5). This circle links an originary trauma and its surface hints and traces, conflating both, creating a single though highly volatile experience of distress. In Duggan and Wallis’ words, “Trauma-event and trauma-symptom constitute a single entity, internally structured by an economy of mutual presence and absence” (Duggan & Wallis, 2011: 9). The flickering and elusive character of this entity make it exceptionally difficult to render, both for victims, who are denied the means for directly confronting the causes of their suffering and working through them, and for artist-witnesses seeking later to aestheticize the specific attributes of victims’ pain.

Reflections of this difficulty abound in the work of writers and other artists contending with what Deborah Britzman has influentially termed “difficult knowledge.” Such knowledge is difficult in virtue of its resistance to explanation and attempts to assign it meaning. Difficult knowledge thwarts conceptualization and is very hard to share; it can be felt but never really fully comprehended. Traumatic experience is paradigmatically “difficult” in this sense. As Britzman along with Alice Pitt explains, the “event of trauma is characterized by a quality of significance that resists meaning even as the affective force of the event can be felt” (Pitt & Britzman, 2003: 158). It is possible to feel trauma’s effects, in other words, without ever knowing exactly why or what to make of them.

Traumatizing Culture Loss

The only possible understanding of such events is available to the insider, the victim himself, and even then only post hoc and in fragments, as a series of loosely conjoined feelings. For the outsider, meaning and understanding remain elusive. This is roughly the position of the celebrated Armenian poet Vahan Derian,¹ who lays out his view on the impenetrability of traumatic experience in his short poem “Foreign.” There he writes that:

Even if you decipher our alphabet
and read our lettered stones,
our labor and ancient pain
would stay unexplained.

The towers that mourn
my dying country do not tell
all, nor move you with their toll.
To you they are bells. (Derian, 8)

Derian here and elsewhere in his corpus seems to assume that Armenians have privileged access to the specifics of their own traumatic history. His worry appears to be rather that non-Armenians will be unable to understand that history in ways that permit its proper recognition, which for him is at once moral and political. And yet in his poem “We Are Orphans Everyone,” he writes:

We are orphans, everyone,
children of the lost,
ground down, motherless, alone
under blackened suns.

We are shoved against our will
onto foreign soils,
calling without voices,
or hope of being heard.

We are praying, but to whom?
Who will hear us, who will come?
Who will take us home?” (Derian, 14)

Here Derian suggests that the experience of genocide and forced deportation has profoundly diminished and disoriented the Armenians themselves, leaving them orphaned, lost, powerless, and alone. Importantly, Derian’s reference to Armenians “calling without voices” (Derian, 14) points to the inability of survivors and their descendants to express what it is that they have endured. Even the hope that any such expression might matter, should it finally prove possible, has been lost. Robbed by their traumatic history both of the power of self-representation as well as of the capacity for belonging (and therefore of the ability to remain a community), not even an all-seeing and compassionate God is able to acknowledge the Armenians’ suffering. Accordingly, for Derian, the diasporic remnants of the population will remain uncomprehending and uncomprehended, abandoned to their miserable, isolating fate.

What Derian is acknowledging in his poem is in effect the destruction of Armenian culture and the trauma that goes along with it. As Peter Balakian has argued, cultural destruction is one of the three primary domains encompassed by the term genocide as conceived of by its originator, the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959). Along with its interruption of physical existence (i.e., life) and biological continuity (i.e., procreative processes and the rearing of children), genocide for Lemkin also targets a group’s means of spiritual or cultural expression and renewal. Hence his distinction between physical, biological, and cultural genocide, none of which Lemkin privileged above the others in terms of its importance since all three similarly result in the destruction of a group’s life (the defining characteristic of any genocide). Lemkin termed physical and biological genocide “barbarism”; and cultural genocide he referred to as “vandalism.” Balakian argues that in addition to mass murder and forced deportation – indeed in many ways as a result or extension of these violent and coercive processes – “what one sees in the eradication of the Armenians is a calculated, but sometimes spontaneous, evolving process of destroying Armenian culture” (Balakian, 2013: 62). With reference to newly-available primary sources, he proceeds to document the many ways in which the Ottoman Turks set about making it impossible for Armenian group life to persist culturally, including their destruction of Armenian churches, artworks, artists, intellectuals, and so on. He also shows how these culturally genocidal practices are in various ways being replicated and sustained through ongoing Turkish state denialism, as well as the neglect and misuse of Armenian heritage sites. In this he echoes Anush Hovanissian, who concludes with respect to modern Turkish attempts to eradicate any trace of the country’s Armenian history that “[t]hese developments are part of a systematic policy of denial of the Genocide and testify to the fact that what is occurring in modern Turkey is cultural vandalism” (Hovanissian, 1999: 152). It should be remembered (and in a way this is Derian’s point), that vital to any culture is the capacity of its members to express themselves in ways that are shared, and recognized as shared. Balakian agrees with Clifford Geertz and Robert J. Lifton that th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Representations of the Armenian Genocide in the Mass Media
• 1 Genocide and the Arts: Creativity, Morality and the Representation of Traumatic Experience
• 2 Ravished Armenia (1919): Bearing Witness in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Some Thoughts on a Film-Ordeal
• 3 A Christian Harem: Ravished Armenia and the Representation of the Armenian Woman in the International Press
• 4 From Silence to Re-remembrance: The Response of German Media to Massacres and Genocide against the Ottoman Armenians
• 5 The Condition of Armenian Refugees and Orphans as Reported in Armyanskiy Vestnik
• 6 The Polish Press and Armenian Genocide from 1895 to 1920
• 7 The 1915 Genocide in the Post-war Ottoman Press and in Parliamentary Records (1918–1919)
• 8 Extreme Violence and Massacres during the First World War: A Comparative Study of the Armenian Genocide and German Atrocities in the Canadian Press (1914–1919)
• 9 A Case of Jewish Coverage of the Armenian Genocide in the United States: Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, “Champion of any Wronged People”
• Epilogue
• Index