states have adopted resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide as a bona fide historical event. for a section that clarifies some of the main parts of the story which are pretty much now known to be essentially true.) And the Turkish government has maintained that the entire Armenian Genocide is a fiction, from the 1930s when the book was published, down to the present day. Presumably most of the characters which people the novel could be guessed to be fictitious, though I certainly have no idea.
Thus it's one of those novels where you can't be sure where to draw the line between fact and fiction. Ataturk was still President when the book was published, and presumably could have just said, "Well that happened under the Ottoman government of that era, Turkey has moved on." But apparently that reaction to the book would have caused enough of a furor among Turkey's population, even supporters of the new regime, that he was unable to make such a statement. This reaction started with the government of Kemal Ataturk, whose modern secular regime had assumed power in Turkey in 1923. Each time these have either quietly died, or been abandoned after clamorous criticism by various elements in Turkey. Several attempts at making a movie of the book have been made over the years, the most serious one in the '30s by MGM. It was published in 1933, 18 years after those events. According to Wiki, it was this novel, which Werfel is said to have researched in depth, which revealed the events upon which it is based to the world beyond Turkey.
Based on the Armenian genocide that occurred in Turkey during World War I.
I remember that it was a fascinating, though horrifying, story, a real page-turner.
0 kommentar(er)
