Título: THE FORTY DAYS OF MUSA DAGH
Autor: WERFEL, FRANZ
Año: 1934
Género: NOVELA HISTÓRICA
Formato: PDF
«The Forty Days of Musa Dagh» (German: Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh) is a 1933 novel by Austrian-Bohemian writer Franz Werfel based on events that took place in 1915, during the second year of World War I and at the beginning of the Armenian genocide.
The novel focuses on the self-defense by a small community of Armenians living near Musa Dagh, a mountain in Vilayet of Aleppo in the Ottoman Empire –now in Hatay Province, part of southern Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast– as well the events in Constantinople (Istanbul) and provincial capitals, where the Young Turk government orchestrated the deportations, concentration camps and massacres of the empire's Armenian citizens. This policy, as well as who bore responsibility for it, has been controversial and contested since 1915. Because of this or perhaps in spite of it, the facts and scope of the Armenian Genocide were little known until Werfel's novel, which entailed voluminous research and is generally accepted as based on historical events.
The novel was originally published in German in November 1933. It achieved great international success and has been credited with awakening the world to the evidence of the persecution and genocide inflicted on the Armenian nation during World War I. «The Forty Days of Musa Dagh» also foreshadows the Holocaust of World War II due in part to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, which paralleled the novel's creation.
This stirring, poignant novel, based on real historical events that made of actual people true heroes, unfolds the tragedy that befell the Armenian people in the dark year of 1915. The Great War is raging through Europe, and in the ancient, mountainous lands southwest of the Caspian Sea the Turks have begun systematically to exterminate their Christian subjects. Unable to deny his birthright or his people, one man, Gabriel Bagradianborn an Armenian, educated in Paris, married to a Frenchwoman, and an officer doing his duty as a Turkish subject in the Ottoman armywill strive to resist death at the hands of his blood enemy by leading 5,000 Armenian villagers to the top of Musa Dagh, the mountain of Moses. There, for forty days, in the face of almost certain death, they will suffer the siege of a Turkish army hell-bent on genocide.
A passionate warning against the dangers of racism and scapegoating, and prefiguring the ethnic horrors of World War II, this important novel from the early 1930s remains the only significant treatment, in fiction or nonfiction, of the first genocide in the twentieth centurys long series of inhumanities.
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