Harvard University Press Blog

German History and the Armenian Genocide

In last year’s Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination, historian Stefan Ihrig demonstrated the extent to which the formation of modern Turkey inspired the Germany imagined by Adolf Hitler, for whom Atatürk was a “star in the darkness.” Now, in the forthcoming Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler, Ihrig turns specifically to the undeniably influential though historically neglected role of the Armenian Genocide in German discourse on “the total annihilation of a people.” That neglect persists even now, as much of the world marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Caught between acceptance and denialism, the Armenian Genocide remains “a piece of history that is not allowed to be history.”

As Ihrig explains in the introduction to Justifying Genocide—a portion of which is excerpted below—he considers it of the utmost importance that his book be part of an open, respectful, and continued dialogue with all interested readers. Even still, he concedes an inability to circumvent usage of the word “genocide,” a term even the American government still resists. The book is about German reactions to and discussions of what happened, and, as Ihrig shows, German actors left little doubt that they understood the Ottoman Empire’s actions to be aimed at the “murder of a nation.”

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To humans in future centuries learning about the 20th century, the story of this century must seem unbelievable if not implausible. One devastating war after the other, hot and cold, and mostly global. And genocide, and lots of it. Millions of children, elderly people, women and men killed for no apparent reason. The organized eradication of whole peoples solely on the pretext of their alleged otherness, again and again. These were humanity’s darkest hours, these were the times when we needed to invent and reinvent words to describe the unspeakable, the unimaginable: Holocaust, Shoah, genocide, and “ethnic cleansing.” To the readers, history students, and historians in the future—and the further into our future, the more so—it must appear also incredible and implausible to assume that one major genocide was not in some way connected to the next. These genocides were something new in the known history of humanity, and certainly new in their own time. And indeed the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust were connected—particularly through actual people, individuals and bodies of people (nations, networks, intellectuals, politicians, readers, etc.).

Questions of guilt have long since distracted from the larger picture—either Germans wanting to deflect guilt or co-responsibility for the events of 1915/16 or, in this context more prevalent and at the time of writing still much more pressing, and pressing onto historical scholarship, that of Turkish guilt. Will the deflections of guilt regarding whether or not this really was genocide matter in the long run? Will there be sympathy in a hopefully more enlightened future for those who were denied the legitimacy of feeling as victims, of persecution, of injustice, of slaughter? Does it matter how many children’s heads were split by axes, how many women raped before they were killed, how many fathers and mothers had seen their sons, wives, daughters, parents and neighbours killed after being humiliated?

Justifying Genocide is a German story and a Jewish story. It is only on a secondary level a “Turkish” or an Armenian story. It is much less about what actually happened between Armenians and Turks (and other Muslim inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire) during World War I and before. It is about what all this meant for Germany, a society which in just under twenty years would give birth to a regime that would carry out the largest genocide in (known) human history.

Helen Vendler's Critical Life

In 1963 we published Helen Vendler’s first book, a study of Yeats based on her Harvard dissertation. We’ve since published nearly two dozen more of her 31 books, a corpus to which we’ll soon add The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, a collection of two decades’ worth of her essays, book reviews, and prose.

Vendler begins The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar with an account of her life as a critic, from childhood enthusiasm to sharpened focus and an urge to write, and from early-career impediments to the “free rein, unlimited space, and genial encouragement” of William Shawn’s New Yorker.

Her life and work are further fleshed out in a recent Harvard Gazette interview, part of a series of discussions with Harvard faculty on their personal paths to becoming teachers and scholars.

With the Gazette Vendler touched on such topics as her early dissatisfaction with the teaching of poetry:

In my student days, it was common to assume that the poem makes a statement — that it’s protesting war, or is grieving a death. My teachers, on the whole, didn’t see a poem as an evolving thing that might be saying something completely new at the end because it had changed its mind from whatever it had proposed at the beginning. I was sure you couldn’t sum it up propositionally: You couldn’t say, as it was common to say, “What is the meaning of this poem?”

Her fascination with the development of individual poets:

My mother had brought back from the bookmobile a biography of Hopkins which quoted many of his poems. I began to read Hopkins with great elation and memorized much of what I read. I wrote what was supposed to be a 17-page high school senior paper, only it turned into a 40-page essay. [Laughter.] I think it was my first book. And it gave me my first taste of critical competence: by then I knew everything Hopkins had written — the letters, the sermons, the devotional writings, the biography. It’s not a big corpus.

It was exhilarating to write at length from knowledge of a single poet’s complete works, since anthologies offer only little snippets. I very soon grasped how rewarding it was to write on a single poet. I’ve never written on themes except as elements in the changing explorations of a poet, the evolution of the author’s poetics from the early juvenilia all the way up to the end.

And sustained need to consider the work of each alone:

I can understand poets only one by one: They are too idiosyncratic to be lumped together.

Each book had a polemical purpose: to declare that Yeats’ “system” had powerful poetic implications; to argue that Stevens’ long poems were not “ponderous and elephantine”; to contest the belief that Herbert could be appreciated adequately only by a faithful son of the church; to show that Keats’ odes had been insufficiently well read, and were in fact interconnected as a series; to assert that Shakespeare’s sonnets, all 154 of them, not merely the famous ones, deserved individual commentaries; to offer an alternative to the Irish political criticism that had neglected Heaney as a poet; and to suggest that Dickinson’s harsher and more difficult poems could, and should, be read by a wider public.

It’s a hallmark much evidenced in The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, which includes readings of longtime Vendler subjects Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, along with consideration of Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Ford, and more.

The Appomattox Myth

Earlier this month, we wrote about Gregory P. Downs’s After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War, and about the interactive companion website Mapping Occupation, which visually represents the distribution of U.S. troops in the states of the former Confederacy in the postwar years. As we reflected in that post—and as David W. Blight writes in his important new piece at The Atlantic—the consequences of the Civil War’s not having ended at Appomattox 150 years ago continue to resonate today. In the introduction to After Appomattox, below, Downs discusses the epoch that began on April 10, 1865, when “the war seemed almost over, and yet the war could not end.”

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On April 8, 1865, after almost four years of fighting and nearly three-quarters of a million deaths, Robert E. Lee wrote to Ulysses S. Grant to ask for “peace.” As the U.S. army closed in on Confederate forces near Appomattox Court House, Virginia, Lee sought a way to end not just the fighting but the entire conflict. With this letter from the Confederate general to the U.S. commander, the Civil War at last seemed near its close. If Grant had accepted Lee’s proposal, the two generals might have negotiated not just an army’s surrender but a nation’s peace, not just an end to fighting but an end to war. But Grant’s aides dismissed Lee’s offer out of hand. The rebel general “wants to entrap us into making a treaty of peace,” one of Grant’s aides said, but “that is the prerogative of the President, or the Senate.” A month earlier, President Abraham Lincoln had reminded Grant that politicians, not generals, would set the terms of peace. Even though Grant had referred to his own “great desire” for peace in a previous letter to Lee, he knew he did not have the power to make that decision. Taking Lee’s reference to peace as a sign that the rebel would not actually surrender and “still means to fight,” Grant went to sleep without sending a response. Upon waking, Grant decided to send a reply to Lee, writing that “I have no authority to treat on the subject of peace.” They could, however, discuss surrender. Even as he dismissed peace, Grant acknowledged that he was “equally anxious for peace.” Trying to appeal to Lee without making any promises, Grant stated that surrender would hasten but not bring peace.”

The distinction between Lee’s “peace” and Grant’s “surrender” would make a great deal of difference over the next five years. Denying peace was among the most important decisions made during the Civil War. It confirmed that the war was fundamentally a political, not just a military, conflict, and its terms would be set by politicians. By allowing the United States to utilize war powers years after battlefield fighting stopped, the continuation of wartime gave the national government the necessary authority to suppress the rebellion, consolidate its forces, and fashion effective civil rights. The United States would not declare peace because it could not be certain of the national government’s own safety. Beyond that, with nearly 3 million people still enslaved, with the Thirteenth Amendment not yet part of the Constitution, and with state laws on the books defending slavery, the U.S. government would not end the war because slavery had not died. Destroying slavery and constructing freedom depended upon the military’s authority to override state laws, displace judges and sheriffs, arrest outlaws, proclaim emancipation, oblige planters to provide contracts, transfer freedpeople’s legal cases to military- backed courts, and try violent white Southerners in front of military commissions—in short, to run an occupation of the South that would have been illegal in peacetime. From that occupation would emerge new rights, new governments, and a newly expanded democracy. Constitutional protections that we still take for granted—due process, equal protection, birthright citizenship, the vote—were by-products of martial law. All of this was on the line as Grant and Lee met in April 1865, yet no one could have predicted how long it would actually take to end the war.

The Long Civil War

This month marks the 150th anniversary of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Court House, an act we remember for ending the fighting of the American Civil War. Then came Reconstruction, an era of legal reshaping that would continue until a compromise following the presidential election of 1876 gave the White House to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for a cessation in federal enforcement of the rights of the nation’s black citizens.

In After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War, historian Gregory Downs calls for a revision to the familiar timeline outlined above, arguing that 1865 marked not an end to the war but a transition to a long second phase of ambitious military occupation. The Civil War couldn’t end with Appomattox, he shows, because slavery itself had not yet ended, and continued bondage throughout the South ensured the need for military force to finally make good on the freedoms won:

Destroying slavery and constructing freedom depended upon the military’s authority to override state laws, displace judges and sheriffs, arrest outlaws, proclaim emancipation, oblige planters to provide contracts, transfer freedpeople’s legal cases to military-backed courts, and try violent white Southerners in front of military commissions—in short, to run an occupation of the South that would have been illegal in peacetime. From that occupation would emerge new rights, new governments, and a newly expanded democracy. Constitutional protections that we still take for granted—due process, equal protection, birthright citizenship, the vote—were by-products of martial law.

Looking at the period after Appomattox in this way entails a general reconsideration of both how we define war and how we describe the time that comes after fighting but before peace. As Downs writes, the Civil War went not straight from conflict to reconciliation but from battle time, to postsurrender wartime, to peacetime:

For four years, between 1861 and 1865, the United States waged an open, flagrant war against the Confederate rebellion. But the United States remained in a state of wartime for three years after surrender in some rebel states and for more than five years in others before finally returning to peacetime in 1871.

Statistics regarding U.S. Army deployments from 1865 to 1870 were a critical source for Downs as he pieced this past together, and through his work he compiled a database of troop movements culled from tens of thousands of documents. Along with Scott Nesbit, University of Georgia Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, Downs has made that information available via Mapping Occupation, both an interactive tool for viewing and interacting with dynamic mappings of U.S. Army posts and a portal for directly accessing the underlying data.

This past weekend Eric Foner, dean of Civil War historians, wrote in the New York Times of “Why Reconstruction Matters,” and of how many of the debates and issues dominating American politics today echo those with which the nation was preoccupied in the years after the Confederate surrender. With After Appomattox and Mapping Occupation, Downs better equips us to learn from that past, plagued as it was by institutional and legal collapse, questions of popular legitimacy, financial issues, demobilization of the army, and outbreaks of violence from paramilitary groups. Indeed, his work resonates for all wars where the cessation of military battles and the transition to peace defies our greatest hopes of smooth passage.