Nascent narratives of Armenian remembrance: The Armenian genocide reflected in the Armenian-American press

Introduction

24 April 2022 has marked a year since the US President officially commemorated the events of 1915 as a genocide. On 24 April 2021, 106 years after the crime – and 56 years after the first public commemoration in the USA bringing to light crimes hitherto swept under a rug – an American president openly recognized the annihilation of one and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as “genocide”. Joe Biden’s statement not only highlighted that the commemoration of the genocide and education on this issue are in line with US policy but, first and foremost, rejected the denial proliferated by Turkey since the days of the crime itself. ¹ Suffice it to add that, amongst the US presidents since 1915, only Ronald Reagan in 1981 used the word “genocide” to describe the slaughter of the Armenians.

Even though long overdue, such an unequivocal statement was needed, above all, by the descendants of survivors, but also for American politicians aiming to present themselves as champions of human rights policy. Their reaction was immediate. For instance, Samantha Power, Barack Obama’s senior foreign policy advisor – who had, for many years, advocated for just such an acknowledgement (Power, 2008) – revealed, in a series of personal tweets minutes after the fact a conversation from 2015. Then Vice President Biden, attending the 100^th anniversary commemoration, told Power that “if he was ever in a position to do so, he would recognize the Armenian genocide” (Power, tweet, 24 April 2021). Unlike Obama, Biden lived up to his promise.

With the new administration’s statement in mind, as well as earlier adopted resolutions by the House of Representatives and the Senate from late 2019 on the same matter, it is worth reflecting on what it is about the genocide committed in the distant Ottoman Empire (under cover of World War I) that this keeps returning to the mainstream of American newspapers and politics in the twentieth-first century. A deeper understanding of the present-day events around that genocide should begin with examining what led to the politicization of the memory of the Armenian genocide worldwide. More to the point here, what is it that launched a struggle for recognition of the 1915 events among Armenian-Americans? ²

The Medz Yeghern – literally meaning “Great Crime” – was the quintessential experience for the autochthonous twentieth-century Armenian community. Although more than a century has passed, this atrocity remains constantly vivid in the memory of the globally-dispersed Armenians. Traumatic experiences have lived on for many decades in the memories of survivors and their descendants. Although the matter of the genocide disappeared from the external mainstream by the early 1920s, recollections were stored within Armenian families at home in Soviet Armenia and in the diaspora, transmitted from generation to generation. It would be 45 years later that publicly visible monuments, demonstrations, state and international resolutions, as well as other instruments of memorialization, would materialize worldwide as the result of a wide-reaching Armenian mobilization. Internalized traces of genocide remembrance were gradually brought to light.

This revival in the mainstream seems particularly interesting in the diasporic context. Over the years, the Armenian enclaves abroad – formed or numerically enlarged after the catastrophe – had evolved into well-organized structures, and their members had relatively quickly improved their socioeconomic status. Putting down roots by Armenians was accompanied by progressive assimilation into host societies. The generation which entered into adulthood in the 1960s constituted of people already born outside the homeland. However, it was amidst this well-integrated diaspora that a catalyzation occurred, focusing on the genocide committed on their ancestors 50 years earlier. The year 1965 initiated an open discourse among Armenian-Americans who were both temporally and spatially separated from the events. Memories of the Medz Yeghern would be released from the private and communal spaces of families, neighborhoods, and communities, making their appearance in the public sphere. This outburst was so powerful and resonant that – consequently, starting in 1965 – most pieces of Armenian art, literature or research within the community directly or indirectly have alluded to the annihilation. Outside the community, any press or TV commentary about Armenians have contained mention of the genocide, and increasingly more countries have adopted resolutions recognizing it. The questions that arise are: what led to this “exteriorization of the memory” of the Armenian genocide (Ritter, 2007: 218) How was it stored throughout the first decades that it could eventually became public and political?

Sources, methods, general remarks

On the following pages, I will investigate the narratives on the Medz Yeghern appearing in the editorials and other articles of two leading Armenian-American newspapers published in Watertown, Massachusetts – Hairenik Weekly (HW) and The Armenian Mirror-Spectator (AMS) ³ (from the 1930s to 1964). The objective is to show how discourse on the matter shaped itself after the highest influx of Armenian refugees to the USA until the moment right before the first public commemoration of the genocide in 1965. For the 1920s, I will also employ the extant analysis by Rubina Peroomian (2004), who placed the first 60 issues of the Armenian-language Hairenik Monthly (from November 1922 to November 1927) under a microscope.

With regards to the content analysis herein, it is important to note that no archives or library is in possession of a full collection of the two periodicals. ⁴ Issues were therefore accessed (in May 2017) at different locations: the Armenian Museum of America (Watertown, MA), National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (Belmont, MA), Hairenik Association (publisher of the Hairenik Weekly, Watertown, MA), Baikar Association (publisher of The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, Watertown, MA), as well as at Harvard Library (Cambridge, MA), and the New York Public Library (New York City). As, in most cases, these newspapers were available only in their original printed version, I was able to look through issues holistically, albeit concentrating on headings and leads and selecting only those devoted to the matter at hand. All such materials were photographed, uploaded, and archived digitally. The only semi-digitalized access was offered by the New York library where some editions of Hairenik Weekly were available on microfilm. In this case, a selected article or the entire issue could be immediately downloaded digitally. On the one hand, this process meant the accrual of an inimitable database of rarely exploited material; on the other hand, certain limitations should be acknowledged, including the fact that this content search was unsupported by any comprehensive search engine.

While browsing the newspapers I simultaneously made annotations in a separate document – jotting down the dates of release, the numbers of the photographed pages, and the titles of articles selected for analysis, their highlights, and key quotes. Thus prepared were 90 pages of notes that later facilitated content review and analysis. Some of these notes, at this early stage of the study, took the form of memos which are seen by grounded theorists as the primary method for pre-analyzing data (Charmaz, 2006: 72) and as providing “an immediate illustration for an idea” (Glaser and Strauss, 1967: 108).

While working with the press material, to the greatest extent possible, I maintained the open attitude recommended by the grounded theorists (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Being from outside of the studied group myself, only strengthened my impartiality toward the analyzed material. Not knowing well the press titles or the studied community was of value as it helped me avoid formulating pre-hypotheses and preconceptions and focus on different interpretations of past events in the antagonized political circles behind the analyzed newspapers. ⁵ Therefore, while delving into the printed materials, I mixed the two periodicals during the first reading and initial coding, thus impeding the formulation of opinions about the ways the topics were handled by specific camps of Armenian-Americans. It was only after rereading and applying the codes in a software program that I reassigned articles back to a newspaper to compare and see if the editorial contributions fit into two different visions and cultures of memory. Concentrated codes, condensing the most important and common codes, ⁶ were grouped and developed further in the analytical process, the effects of which are presented in this article.

Although none of the analyzed publications provided any reader’s guide to editorial topics in early issues, perusal suggests that these columns comprised standard opinion pieces (op-eds, in a sense) reflecting the editorial board’s core beliefs and positions regarding issues perceived then as current and critical. Most frequently, a brief, single column long article would be published on the second page with no author byline. This indicates authorship by a member of the editorial board, because, in the case of guest editorials, the name of the writer was always given. These texts were not of an objective journalistic nature, but rather narratives in which an element of knowledge mingled with moral or emotional components.

The analysis below encompasses all editorials published in reference to the April 24^th commemorations from the first issues of the newspapers (1932 for the AMS and 1934 for HW) to the year 1964. In some instances, I also took into consideration certain contextual references to other articles dedicated to the genocide and published on the front-page. These additional pieces usually entailed an op-ed contribution and were written by a non-staffer who was either an expert on the subject or proffered a provocative stance toward a given issue. Incorporation of these texts in the analysis is justified as they complemented the content of the editorials themselves.

What is equally important is that many thematic similarities in approaches to the genocide can be found in the editorials of both the periodicals. This fact was unexpected as the newspapers, published by opposing political parties, presented rival points of view in countless instances. With regards to the Medz Yeghern, however, their opinions were rather similar. For this reason, I decided not to present the analysis of the two weeklies separately but, instead, have organized their content by decades (reflected in the order of the sections below).

A final preliminary remark: it is worth noting that the word “genocide” appeared in the editorials for the first time in 1947 in HW ⁷ and in the AMS ⁸ – a few years later. That said, the term was not too frequently used throughout the period leading up to 1965. ⁹ Both before and after the establishment of the Genocide Convention in late 1948, and its entry into force in early 1951, Armenians referred to their tragic past using other English terms such as martyrdom, massacre, deportation, the greatest tragedy, blackest page of history, holocaust, ¹⁰ crime or the great crime. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this article, I will use the terms genocide and the Medz Yeghern consistently, regardless of the period.

Cultural memory and cultural trauma

From a theoretical perspective, this article is anchored in the concepts of cultural memory and cultural studies. Maurice Halbwachs (Halbwachs, 1925), the foremost contributor to memory discourse, understood collective memory as jointly shared representations of the past. For the French sociologist, memory was strictly a result of socialization and communication: one’s individual remembrance depended on his or her participation in social groups (Assmann, 2008).

One of the most fruitful developments of Halbwachs’s concept belongs to Jan Assmann who juxtaposed communicative and cultural memory. In this dichotomy, the former is based on everyday communication and interaction – unstable, disorganized, and typically occurring between partners who switch roles of speaker and listener with each other. It is not institutionalized nor formalized in any material representation. In reference to the study at hand, this memory would belong to the two fundamental frameworks: family and ethnic community in exile (e.g., neighborhoods, churches, newspapers, and other communal spaces). Transmitted, whether verbally or subconsciously, the traumatic experiences would also become a component of the postmemory (Hirsch, 1999, 2001, 2012) with which subsequent generations were equipped. Cultural memory, however, enters the realm of objectivized culture, which is “the culturally institutionalized heritage of a society” (Assmann, 1995: 130) comprising texts, images, rites, practices, monuments, etc. “Cultivation” of this heritage “serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image” (Assmann, 1995: 132).

Cultural memory’s horizon does not change with the passage of time; it is based on fixed points. This does not mean, however, that memory preserves the past. Quite the contrary: as Assmann (Assmann, 1995: 130) argued, “cultural memory works by reconstructing, that is, it always relates its knowledge to an actual and contemporary situation.” How is that possible? According to the scholar, cultural memories are of two modes. They appear in the mode of potentiality when representations of the past are stored on different carriers; they pass into the mode of actuality when these representations are updated with contemporary contexts. As explained by Wulf Kansteiner (2002: 182–183), they “traverse the whole spectrum, from the realm of communicative memory to the realm of actual memory and finally potential cultural memory (and vice versa).” This, in turn, implies that the past is reconstructed from the points of view and interests of contemporary people. In other words, we choose from the past what is vital for the present interests of the groups to which we belong. In this way – quite independently of our ethical obligations associated with the duty to remember (as we shall soon see in the case of the Armenians) – memory is formed.

Cultural memory in an actual mode becomes precisely what John Bodnar (1992: 5) called public memory constituting “a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future.” It is located within a public sphere where different parts of society can exchange views. Its focal point is not the past but, as Bodnar notices, “serious matters in the present such as the nature of power … [that] is always in question in a world of polarities and contradictions” (Bodnar, 1992: 5).

Developing the collective memory concept via this cultural memory structure, Jan Assmann focused on Halbwachs’s definition of memory as a product of human interactions. To a certain degree, cultural memory is a form of collective memory: they both are shared by collectives of people, and they both are framed by social contexts. The difference between these memories lies in embedding of cultural memory within the framework of external objects and institutions helping in transferences (Assmann, 2008). Nevertheless, as Jeffrey Olick notices, even such an approach does not help us overcome the individualistic/collectivistic dichotomy in understanding the notion of collective memory (Olick, 2007). That is because we deal here with two different concepts of culture: “one that sees culture as a subjective category of meanings contained in people’s minds versus one that sees culture as patterns of publicly available symbols objectified in society” (Olick, 1999: 336). The first one is the level of individual, cognitive memory that occurs in a human mind. Despite that, it is entirely shaped by sociocultural contexts, namely, interactions with other humans and external symbols. “Things do not ‘have’ a memory of their own,” Jan Assmann states, “but they may remind us, may trigger our memory, because they carry memories which we have invested into them, things such as dishes, feasts, rites, images, stories and other texts, landscapes, and other ‘lieux de mémoire’” (Assmann, 2008: 111). At the symbolic level, those external objects take on importance. As societies and groups do not remember in the literal sense, they require different mnemonic institutions to register, store, and retrieve.

Assmann also draws our attention to a noteworthy difference between communicative and cultural memory, that is to say, the structure of participation. As he sees it, within the social dimension, communicative memory does not have any “specialists” qualified to transfer knowledge. The latter, transmitted during everyday interactions, is closely related to the language and social competence of interlocutors which are diverse. Cultural memory, on the other hand – in all types of societies, whether oral or literate – has specialized carriers of memory, such as shamans, bards, priests, teachers, artists, clerks, scholars, etc. (Assmann, 2008: 114), but also libraries, monuments, archives, etc.

Memory and its transmission from generation to generation are of particular importance when related to a traumatic event. Per Dominick LaCapra (2004), I distinguish a traumatic event from a traumatic experience where the former refers to an event from the past (that has traumatic consequences), and the latter consists of reliving this past. “The experience … relates to a past that has not passed away – a past that intrusively invades the present and may block or obviate possibilities in the future” (LaCapra, 2004: 55). These experiences are constantly present in memory, described by LaCapra as traumatic. “In traumatic memory the past is not simply history as over and done with” (LaCapra, 2004: 56). Those memories do not allow history to go away, and unceasingly haunt an individual and a community (if they are shared by one).

In contrast to trauma lived out individually, trauma at the collective level does not come from a group’s painful experiences, but is socially constructed. According to Jeffrey Alexander, in order for a phenomenon to become traumatic, it must pass into the realm of cultural meanings. “Cultural trauma,” says Alexander, “occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever, and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander, 2012: 6). For the American sociologist, trauma stems from recognition of an ordeal as the main threat to a group’s identity. Alexander explains: “Traumatic status is attributed to real or imagined phenomena, not because of their actual harmfulness or their objective abruptness, but because these phenomena are believed to have abruptly, and harmfully, affected collective identity” (Alexander, 2012: 14). In this regard, trauma is not necessarily experienced directly by everyone in the group, yet, the traumatic meaning of a given event must be accepted by the members (Eyerman, 2004). This, in turn, presupposes the existence of carrier groups responsible for mediation and representation of the event as well as the whole trauma process, filling the gap between the event and its representation. Their objective, as Alexander puts it, is “meaning making,” which involves public articulation of claims (defining injury, victims, consequences, ascribing responsibility), and persuading storytelling (constructing symbolic meanings). Even though the Armenian case was not discussed by Alexander in his book, a similar mechanism of meaning-making (as will be seen here) was realized by Armenians to disclose to the rest of the world the crime committed on their ancestors a few decades earlier.

Thus imagined and represented, trauma is shared by members of the collectivity which consequently leads to the revision of group identity. Collective memory, carrying out an ongoing reconstruction of thoughts and images, lies at the core of this change. Jan Assmann points out: “The truth of memory lies in the identity that it shapes… If ‘We Are What We Remember,’ we are the stories that we are able to tell about ourselves” (Assmann, 2011: 14–15). These narratives are myths merging a group into a collective being and playing an essential role in the formation within that identity. A similar approach is presented by Robert Bellah and colleagues (Bellah et al., 1985) who refer to a genuine community as a “community of memory” – as one that remembers its past. “In order not to forget that past,” the authors explain, “a community is involved in retelling its story, its constitutive narrative, and in doing so, it offers examples of the men and women who have embodied and exemplified the meaning of the community” (Bellah et al., 1985: 153). Storytelling, constitutive narrative, and exemplifications – although they intend to convey values and virtues to the members of a group – do not transmit exclusively glorious history nor appreciate only the greatest attainments. A real community of memory shares also traumatic stories of collective suffering.

In order to sustain the new sense of self, as well as to empower trauma discourse, the collectivity brings in to existence different sorts of institutions honoring and ritualizing the painful past. In other words, to apply Assmann’s approach, it transfers memory from the area of everyday communication into the form of objectivized culture. According to Alexander (2012: 27), institutionalization of “the lessons of the trauma,” although this helps to keep in mind and pass on the memory, deprives the latter of its sacredness and the strong emotions formerly associated with it. Nevertheless, the new group identity, developed in the process of meaning making and shaped by collective memory, continues, becoming “a fundamental resource for resolving future social problems and disturbances of collective consciousness” (Alexander, 2012: 27). ¹¹

1920s: Communicative and cultural – parallel construction of memories

The case study of Armenian genocide remembrance sheds new light upon the concept of communicative and cultural memories developed by Jan Assmann (2008). Among Armenians, we observe an almost parallel development of both types of memory. Dark genocide stories have been transmitted orally by survivors (Miller and Miller, 1999). Congruently, this memory quickly penetrated the sphere of culture – also by the efforts of survivors themselves. One of the most well-known examples is the book Ravished Armenia written in 1918 by the genocide survivor Aurora Mardiganian. A year later, her mémoire witnessing the Armenian ordeal in the Ottoman Empire was filmed by an American director Oscar Apfel (with Mardiganian in a lead role as herself) and released under the title Auction of Souls.

Another prescient trace of cultural memory of the genocide can be found in the ethnic press, appearing in the United States as of the first decades afterwards. Initially delivered solely in Armenian, these preliminary transmissions prevented people outside the enclave from accessing such “encrypted” content. Consequently, a reliving of the Medz Yeghern by writing or reading about it was strictly reserved for Armenian-speakers. Insight into exemplary representations of the genocide at an early stage of their formation can be found in a paper by Rubina Peroomian (2004) who analyzed the 1920s press narratives from the most widely read Armenian monthly – Hairenik. ¹²

As Peroomian emphasizes, no genocide testimonies of eyewitnesses nor their memoirs were published. Why? According to the researcher, memories of the genocide were too recent then to reveal them publicly, and the struggle for survival in exile too absorbing for refugees to so openly process their traumas on the pages of a newspaper. Nonetheless, the Great Crime echoed in the magazine, primarily in poetry, the sense of which Peroomian unveils in her analysis. ¹³

In one poetic piece of memory, we get to know the story of Mary Galaijian ¹⁴ who, after having survived all her loved ones, takes home a newborn that she found in a bush. Her care over the little one partially fills the emptiness and incredible loneliness the author-narrator suffers. One day, the mother of the child appears in Galaijian’s house. The woman is impoverished, mentally shattered, and unable to nurse her own baby. Despite her poverty, Mary accepts the mother and lets her stay to recover. When the mother gets better, she disappears with her child, leaving their savior “in the agony of her loneliness and grief” once again (Peroomian, 2004: 125).

Another Galaijian tale ¹⁵ portrays the extent to which the genocide had destructively impacted its victims. In a letter addressed to her husband, a woman describes the suffering she and her son endured when the father went to work one morning and never returned. For the sake of her son and herself, she marries a Kurd and goes to live with him and his mother. When the old woman dies, the man kills his stepson to have his wife exclusively for himself. The devastated woman, in an act of revenge, murders her Kurdish husband and runs away.

In another poem, Tsaygerg (An Evening Song), written by Vazgen Shushanian, ¹⁶ the author-narrator writes to his dead little sister who, like the rest of their family, was killed before his own eyes during the death marches. The author shares his burdensome memories, disclosing the profound influence they have on his psyche. Vazgen is unable to create a normal relationship because, each time he finds himself in an intimate situation with a girl, he feels as if he is betraying his little sister.

In a series of articles, ¹⁷ Aram Haygaz reminds us of the course of events and describes life during the Medz Yeghern. One of his pieces is devoted to all mothers “whose boundless religious devotion did not save them from the raging waves of the Euphrates” (Haygaz cited in Peroomian 2004: 125). In another text, Haygaz weeps for this generation that was supposed to participate in the rebirth of Armenia but perished in the genocide instead. This lost generation, as Peroomian translates: “after years of search, seemed to have found the Hope for the spirit of the nation’s revival, instead of becoming the light-bearer of this road, was turned into skeletons thrown alongside that road” (Peroomian 2004: 125).

As presented in the examples above (but also others recalled by Peroomian in her analysis), a dominant theme in these pieces was the ordeal itself. In my view, they draw the most iconic images of the Armenian genocide: the complicated Armenian-Kurdish relations, in which the Kurd was once a savior, once an executioner; the psychological devastation of the victims, especially the perpetual, mental connection of those who survived with their loved ones who did not make it through the death marches. The authors of these texts also share the loneliness and pain of those who were the sole survivors from an entire family. It seems like, a few years after the Great Crime, these experiences could be expressed only through literary fiction as if the events described did not actually take place.

Throughout the 1920s, the Armenian-language press would remain the most valuable medium objectifying the memory of the genocide for Armenian-speaking readers. In the following sections, I will present the process of the construction of Armenian cultural memory as it occurred on the pages of the English-language ethnic press. I will reveal how then-current events and sociopolitical contexts actualized this memory. As we shall see, taken as a whole, this decades-long process institutionalized the memory, and sustaining it helped stabilize and convey the group’s self-image.

1930s: Educate the community – memory as a moral obligation

The Armenian Mirror (AM) was created as an English-language publication ¹⁸ while the Hairenik Weekly stemmed from the longest running Armenian-language newspaper, but by the early 1930s two major Armenian weeklies were publishing in English. Since then, almost every year around April 24^th, both newspapers have published editorials addressing the massacres. ¹⁹ The editors can be seen as peculiar “specialized carriers of memory” (Assmann, 2008: 114), who, by virtue of their position, can be considered sufficiently qualified to transfer knowledge on the Medz Yeghern.

Four core categories emerge from analysis of the narratives issued in the 1930s: 1) to educate/raise awareness on the matter (within and outside the Armenian community); 2) to express regrets about the sluggishness of Western countries to react; 3) to express fear that the crime would be repeated; and 4) to commemorate and pay respects to the martyrs as a moral obligation of all Armenians. Due to the nature of the Armenian Genocide Memorial Day, the last of these would constitute the dominant element across all the editorials.

As for the first category, both newspapers highlighted the value of passing knowledge on to the younger generation of Armenian-Americans. Defining wounds, naming perpetrators and victims – here, moreover, articulated in the language of generations that, over time, would cease using Armenian in favor of English – is the initial step of the meaning-making process (Alexander, 2012). It marks the beginning of imbuing events with a traumatic sense for people who had not gone through the genocide personally.

In the editors’ approach, the lead column served, first and foremost, to raise awareness of the genocide. Therefore, positioned here were texts filled with detailed descriptions of the crime, vividly recounting the indelible April night of 1915 when the ordeal began. The journalists further accented “a great sacrifice for freedom,” which the victims of the Medz Yeghern had made for their homeland (HW, 22 April 1938: 2), and that they had not died in vain. “The loss of that million, ²⁰ therefore, was a contribution to the cause of liberty and deserves compensation, not pity” (HW, 21 April 1939: 2). Awareness-raising also seems to have been aimed at boosting pride in being Armenian. The authors reflected on the resistance and heroic endeavors that Armenians manifested in uprisings. The emphasis on Armenian heroism and the people’s fighting spirit was especially evident in Hairenik Weekly – and, incidentally, also in line with its party’s core political beliefs. In the article opening the commemorative issue in 1934, V. Calandar Nalbandian commented as follows:

The Turk is known the world over as a good soldier. But those who know him well will tell you that he will not take chances. He will not engage in battle, unless superior in numbers. He does not possess that brand of courage which is essentially of the spirit. The Armenian could perform miracles if he were not denied what other peoples, ancient and modern, enjoy as a natural right – what the Greek called “the equal favor of the gods” and the American calls, “a fighting chance.” As it is, success in fifty per cent of the cases, with odds ninety per cent against us, is the inspiring chart of the Armenian-Turkish encounters whenever and wherever the Armenian has “dared to dare” (HW, 26 April 1934: 1).

Regarding the second category, commemorative articles in the 1930s also expressed the desolation Armenians felt because the rest of the world had forgotten and disregarded their tragedy. As the AM editor emphasized, 24 April 1915 scarred not only Armenian history but also “placed an ineffaceable blemish on human history, on human conscience, which will remain as a sign of dishonor forever” (AM, 21 April 1933: 2). As Dikran H. Boyajian expressed this in a front-page article written on the occasion of the 18^th anniversary:

Deep in our heart is engraved in letters of fire the history of the sufferings of our people and the platonic sympathy of those in the civilized world, who looked upon the atrocities of a barbaric nation graciously, and who turned [a] deaf ear to the heartrending cries of a dying race (AM, 21 April 1933: 1).

Resentment toward the “civilized world” for not stopping the “barbaric Turks” and not holding them responsible afterward will return with an increased strength many times over the next years. ²¹ It will become a part of the Armenian “constitutive narrative” (Bellah et al., 1985: 153), and will play a vital role in the formation of the Armenian identity based on this sense of resentfulness toward the West.

As for the third category, this lack of engagement by the international community seems to stand behind the Armenian fear that Turkey would seek another favorable moment to obliterate the Armenian population. “There is however one party that has not forgotten the Armenian cause,” wrote the HW editor in 1934. “It is the Turk, who is looking for another opportunity to repeat the carnage of nineteen years ago in the present Armenia and thus get rid of – once and for all – the Armenian question” (HW, 26 April 1934: 2). Such a specter was not an unreasonable or irrational apprehension: it was one often haunting victims of traumas. Nor did it seem to be a populist gambit by the Dashnaks aimed at finding a common enemy in the face of a massive crisis engulfing the Armenian community in the US after the Archbishop’s murder a few months earlier. ²²

As the 1930s dawned, Armenians considered actions undertaken by the recently established Turkish state threatening. The new republic distanced itself from the crimes committed against Armenians. Uncomfortable issues were swept under the rug. Denying the genocide became the Turkish raison d’état, the official interpretation of the events of 1915 began to be imposed on the society and discrimination toward surviving ethnic minorities (mostly Kurds) became institutionalized. As Bobelian (2009: 8) describes: “the Turkish Historical Society took up the task in 1931, quickly forging textbooks calling the multinational composition of the Ottoman regime an aberration.” Armenians from the diaspora were aware of the situation of their compatriots back home. Concurrently, the anxiety of the Armenian-Americans was fueled by cases of Turkish actions (reported at the time in the Armenian press) aimed at impeding subsequent translations of Franz Werfel’s ([1933] 1990) famous book on the self-defense of Armenians from Musa Dagh, as well as the production of a film based on this story. ²³ Uncertainty and insecurity were sensed by Armenian-Americans who tried not to “provoke” Turks. This is how Hairenik Weekly commented on this change of “mentality”:

Slowly and subtly, a new mentality has been creeping in among us lately. “Lest we offend the Turk,” is the bugaboo whispered continuously. There were found those bearing the name of Armenian who thought Werfel’s “Forty Days” should not be translated into Armenian because such a thing would only serve to widen the chasm between the two races and perpetuate an old feud (HW, 24 April 1936: 2).

Such fears kept some Armenians from participating in communal commemorations of the genocide. As mentioned in the 1935 HW editorial, the possible repercussions on Armenians were considered a reason why some members of the Armenian communities had been withdrawing from active participation in the Memorial Day (“lest we provoke, and invite upon us the unnecessary wrath of the enemy,” HW, 26 April 1935: 2). This can be clarified, I believe, in two ways. Firstly, the author presumably had Armenians from Turkey in mind, and not Armenian-Americans commemorating the Medz Yeghern on American soil. Considering the small number of Turks in the US at the time, this hypothetical self-restraint regarding commemorations seems exaggerated. Remembrance of the genocide in an Armenian church in Massachusetts or California (because precisely this type of memorialization dominated in the 1930s) would not have jeopardized the safety of Armenian-Americans. A second interpretation may be psychological and associated with the interpenetration of an external and internal sense of danger, often found in trauma victims. Ervin Staub (2005: 267) explains:

neither the Armenian community nor the Jewish community in the United States faces serious threat or danger. However, the Armenian people in Armenia and the Jewish people in Israel face danger. Under conditions of threat, the external danger and the internal sense of danger growing out of past history tend to merge.

Nonetheless, public commemorations and other visible signs of belonging to the Armenian “race” are seen by the HW editorial board as the surest remedy against the Turkish threat. That is why, already in 1934, leaders from the gazette appealed to their fellow Armenians in exile for unity in the fight against an external oppressor. As we read in the editorial:

This opportunity will be given to the Turk unless we forget our petty internal strife and concentrate our efforts on rendering important the blow that “new” Turkey is preparing in order to finish the work that old Turkey left unfinished. The blood of one million martyrs of Armenian people calls for national unity, for a united front against the external enemy. To leave that voice unheeded means sure death for our nation and the last page of our history will be the most shameful page of history, and this generation will be condemned as the unworthy remnant of the Armenian people (HW, 26 April 1934: 2).

However, as this call for unity came shortly after the December 1933 assassination, it is understandable that an appeal appearing then did not evoke a positive response.

1940s: Mixed hopes – Armenian ad hoc comparisons to the holocaust

The anniversary comments from the 1940s have their own clearly outlined context. They were penned in years when a new World War was taking its toll in Europe and elsewhere. Armenians from America followed these events with vivid interest. For them, this war was not as distant as it might have seemed. The conflict instantly evoked parallels between the fate of Armenians from the Great War and the fate of nations in the ongoing war. This brought back memories from the past and shook Armenians to the core. At the same time, for many Armenian-Americans, this new World War was also the first in which second-generation Armenian immigrants would be mobilized as American citizens and sent to the front (AMS, 30 December 1942; AMS, 5 May 1943). ²⁴ The narratives from the 1940s boil down to two basic categories: a comparison of the Medz Yeghern with the Shoah and mixed hopes for the recognition of the Armenian genocide.

With regards to the first, perusing the same publications, we can see how knowledge about the mass atrocities committed during WWII evolved over the years of the conflagration. At first, Armenians were clueless as to the enormity of the new crimes against humanity. This is evident in spontaneous comparisons between the horrors of the present and the atrocities committed against Armenians decades earlier:

Crowded cities have been bombed mercilessly, men have been chained and tortured in concentration camps, yet the fury of the present-day beasts has a great deal to go to match the cruelty of those who waylaid and butchered in cold blood the defenseless caravan of exiles, who made the aged and the young march under the scorching sun along the banks of rivers – shooting instantly those who would attempt to quench their thirst (AMS, 23 April 1941: 2).

That same year, the HW editor wrote: “It is no exaggeration to say that the tragedy of no people in the present war can even remotely compare with the Armenian tragedy of 1915” (HW, 25 April 1941: 2). Even as late as 1945, an editor asserted: “any daring soul – European or American – could have visited not one nor ten, but scores of Buchenwalds and Belsens and Ohrdrufs in Van, in Urfa, in Zeitun and Hadjin and Der-Zor” ²⁵ (AMS, 28 April 1945: 2). In this context, Armenians described their genocide and its memory as “unique.” “The Armenian Memorial Day commemorates a hideous crime and a great human tragedy – the uprooting of a whole people from their ancestral homes, the outright destruction of over a million lives, and the blighting of the lives of another million survivors,” opened his column the HW editor. “In this sense, the Armenian Memorial Day is unique, and is the only one of its kind in the world” (HW, 29 April 1948: 2). ²⁶ Moreover, before the end of the war, Armenian journalists were also afraid that the Nazi crimes would be promptly forgotten. “Tomorrow, the humanity will again forget the outrages of today” (AMS, 23 April 1943: 2). A similar concern was expressed in Hairenik Weekly in the spring of 1943 as the death camps were taking their toll:

If the Turkish crime can be forgotten so soon, if the criminal can go scot free and the wronged still awaits restitution, what guarantee is there that the same shall not be repeated tomorrow, and what assurance have we that the present calamity of small nations, about which we beat our breasts and whose wrong we decry to high heaven, shall not meet a like fate tomorrow, just like the Armenians? (HW, 28 April 1943: 2).

With painful irony, Armenians hoped that the tragedy of others might help to put the question of their neglected genocide back on the table. “It may be a remote hope, yet we love to think” – an HW editor yearned – “that the present calamity with its train of universal suffering will quicken the conscience of mankind to a degree which will make the voice of two million Armenian martyrs heard in the next era of peace” (HW, 29 April 1942: 2). The great expectations of Armenian-Americans were also associated with the emerging United Nations. As printed in the anniversary edition of The Armenian Mirror-Spectator (29 April 1944: 2):

We believe that the day of retribution will not be long delayed when the gathering might of the United Nations strikes the death blow to the arch-criminals of mankind, and the perpetrators of the crimes of Pearl Harbor and Lidice and Rotterdam and Athens will be brought before the tribunal of justice and punished by the peoples themselves.

However, these hopes were mixed with fear that the retribution, for both persecuted peoples, would not be delivered. Even at the beginning of the Nuremberg trials, the Armenian diaspora could not rid itself of a doubt that the legal proceedings would bring any justice to the victims or punishment to the criminals (AMS, 20 April 1946). They worried that “Western Christian democracies” would show mercy on the Germans as they had done for Turkey after WWI. In particular, Armenian-Americans were irritated by the illogical attitude of the USA which forced other nations to forget crimes committed against them, whereas Americans themselves did not let injustice committed upon them to be forgotten: “The preachers of forgiveness and magnanimity who … always remind us of ‘Pearl Harbor,’ exhort us to forgive and forget Buchenwald, Lidice … Can America forget Pearl Harbor? How can the Czechs forget Lidice? … Can we forget 24 April 1915?” (AMS, 19 April 1947: 2). ²⁷

These double standards by the United States – alongside the Turkish denial and the (seemingly) intentional forgetfulness of the international bodies discussed below – constitute favorable circumstances for the development of cultural trauma. Similar to the mass atrocities themselves, they lead to a collision of fundamental values, undermining the foundations of the group’s identity (Sztompka, 2000) and causing the pain of “dramatic loss … meaning” (Eyerman, 2004: 160).

1950s: Need for restitution claims

Demands for restitution were more often and more clearly formulated in the 1950s and thus the most saturated category for this decade. ²⁸ Indubitably, such a mentality was inspired and initiated by the then ongoing German-Israeli talks, during which, as The New York Times (8 April 1952: 28) reported, Chancellor Adenauer made promises “to make moral and material amends for the unspeakable crimes perpetrated in the name of the German people by the Hitler regime” (also cited in AMS, 26 April 1952: 2). Such a statement strengthened Armenians in their belief that the same compensation would also be due them from the Turks. Commemorative articles at this time were filled with regret and disappointment that the world had forgotten about the Armenians, whereas the Jews could count on redress from the successors of their tormentors. “The Turk today has shown no such spirit of repentance, restitution and justice” (HW, 30 April 1953: 2), noting that there could be neither forgiveness nor forgetfulness when there is neither compensation nor justice. The AMS editor wrote in a fairly religious tone when the Memorial Day of 1954 fell on Easter Sunday: “We pray that … the spirit of justice will triumph over a forgetful world” (AMS, 24 April 1954: 2). “No reparations have come from those tragic days, no rights have been granted the Armenian people,” they repeated in 1958 (AMS, 19 April 1958: 2).

Disappointment and regret only deepened. In the course of the analysis, my initial “claims-making” category synthesized into two interacting aspects: a growing Armenian frustration and resentment toward Turks. The Armenian dissatisfaction with the lack of progress in their case ²⁹ was doubly aggravated by Turkish advancements in the international arena. In 1952, the country became a member of NATO. Adding insult to injury, it also participated in the United Nations Genocide Committee. The AMS addressed this rather poetically:

The night is hushed with a strained silence and on the night today and tomorrow the hush shall be strained – surely at least until genocide is removed from the face of the earth – but this may be long in coming for are not those who advocate this, the civilized of the world and does not the Turk sit on the United Nations genocide panel (AMS, 20 April 1957: 2).

The 1950s, to some degree, was a period of latency. The Armenians from both sides of the political aisle (even more divided by the increasing Cold War) plunged into a depression in view of compensations paid to the victims of the Second World War. An impression that they were standing on the periphery was further deepened by the image of Turkey re-emerging as a significant ally of the Western world. That notwithstanding, this decade was not a total loss as it resulted in the progressive development of an intellectual base taking place backstage. Armenian programs at US universities, as well as grassroots educational, cultural, and research associations (among other things), contributed to the rebirth of the Armenian intelligentsia and simultaneously provided the diaspora with specialists for knowledge transfer about the Medz Yeghern (Assmann, 2008).

1960s: Toward the fiftieth anniversary – the mobilizing sense of injustice

In the editorials of the 1960s, the dominant tones expressed pain and a sense of injustice as the disappointment of Armenians festered throughout Eichmann’s infamous trial, his conviction, and execution. It hurt them to realize that their perpetrators were never brought to justice before nor condemned by analogous international tribunals. ³⁰ Even though such actions would not bring the dead back to life, they were, as Armenians believed, an indispensable sign of protest and a warning for future generations:

Just as the death of Eichmann cannot atone for the loss of millions of Jews, for it becomes a mockery to hold one man in contempt of human behavior, so would the death of one Turk, say a Talaat, have the same mocking effect. Yet the public forum established may serve a greater purpose for the many now-grown who read these things but from afar. It will establish in their minds the horror of man in moral and material decadence. It may revive painful memories, but it will also assert to the world that such barbarity must not, cannot take place (AMS, 22 April 1961: 2).

In this decade, Armenians expressed their frustration with the ostensible Turkish metamorphosis from a “barbaric race,” “wild beast from the jungles,” and a “barbarous horde” into a seemingly respectable member of the international community. Again, Armenian wounds were exacerbated as the Turkey of the 1960s stigmatized Greece for violent attacks against the Turkish minority in Cyprus, all the while continually denying Turkey’s own past transgressions against Armenians and other ethnicities. As the HW editor commented on the Turkish reaction to the 1963–1964 intercommunal violence in Cyprus between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots: “‘Genocide in this century is unpardonable,’ the Turkish representative cries out. But when the Turks were massacring the Armenians in 1915, the unpardonability of genocide in this age never occurred to them” (HW, 23 April 1964: 2). ³¹

Moreover, anger was also provoked by the United Nations which, contrary to Armenian hopes, did nothing to restore the visibility of their cause. A tone of indignation reverberated in the leading article of that same edition:

When is Our case to be heard? When will the UN support the principles which it loudly professes? Is justice for the strong as it has always been in history? Then let us be strong. We say to the world – the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Genocide comes in one more year – April 24, 1965. The patience of Armenians is great indeed; but it is not inexhaustible! (HW, 23 April 1964: 3).

The inexplicable delays and years of exasperation brought on by international passivity helped mobilize the Armenians of the 1960s to eventually take matters into their own hands and to independently bring their case before the world. In 1965, a year pivotal for Armenians, both political factions (though separately for the time being) went public with their claims to remind the non-Armenian audience about the nature of the Turkish crime. On the Memorial Day of 1965, Armenians for the first time took to the streets of their cities to demand justice and hold Turkey liable. They organized general awareness-raising campaigns and well-targeted informative actions to gain supporters for their cause. This was the first such open observance made in public spaces and addressed to a broader audience. The outburst was so resonant in America that, consequently and progressively after 1965, the first states began memorializing the Armenian genocide either by legislation or proclamation and, in 1975, the US Congress adopted a Joint Resolution, calling the annihilation of Armenians a “genocide” expressis verbis.

For the Armenian remembrance of the genocide, the mid-1960s symbolize the shift from ‘individualistic’ to ‘collectivist’ collective memory (as per Olick’s definition). From sociocultural and political contexts in which certain individuals created those meanings, it evolved into memory objectivized in symbols and mnemonic institutions (e.g., special laws, monuments, archives, books, libraries, commemorations, etc.), slowly beginning the penetration of the memory of the Armenian genocide into the mainstream public discourse.

The Medz Yeghern has become politicized but also mythologized in a sense given to a turning point event. The collective memory of the genocide transformed it into a political myth functioning “as a lens through which group members perceive the present and prepare for the future” (Zerubavel, 2011: 240). The collective traumas of the past in some way replaced the old myth of the common Armenian origin and (to use LaCapra’s formulation) became the founding trauma (LaCapra, 2004: 57) for a new collective identity with its new mindset, cultural pattern, and ways of activism, that I would describe as the identity of secondary traumatization. This term implies what I think is best mirrored in the Armenian narratives: a traumatizing sense of injustice reinforced by the reparations and compensation for the Jews and due punishment of Third Reich war criminals. This identity was created by a lack of such justice for Armenians.

Changing narratives

Which meanings have Armenians bestowed upon their memory over the subsequent decades? Which representations and contexts shifted this memory into the mode of actuality? Primarily, in the 1930s, this remembrance was actualized by a deep sense of harm, injustice, abandonment, and a terrifying feeling that the oppressor might return to “finish the job.” That memory also consisted of a noble pride that its bearers have held with regards to their ancestors who remained forever faithful to their homeland and religion. This meaning-making was, undoubtedly, influenced by Franz Werfel’s classic work which unveiled the heroism of the Armenian nation before the whole world.

Subsequently, in the 1940s, memory of the Medz Yeghern became a reference point vis-à-vis the injustices and sufferings of other people. It evolved into a kind of mirror which could reflect for Armenians the trauma of others, but concurrently evoke comparisons: Are their sufferings as massive as ours? Are they equally painful? Are they going to be remembered and, more importantly, recompensed? Such a memory helped diaspora Armenians comprehend the broader context. Then, in the 1950s, Armenian remembrance collided with a painful awareness that, in order for Armenians to get justice, they needed to prove their victimhood and openly battle against Turkish propaganda. Although Armenian-Americans were not (yet) equipped with the necessary social, political and/or economic capital to take up the fight, demands for recognition of the crimes were increasingly articulated. Ultimately, the first half of the 1960s brought things back to the starting point: the memory reflected again a defined sense of injustice, causing enormous frustration and triggering a desire to surpass the basic frameworks – family and ethnic community – in which it was initially embedded.

What emerges from the editorials is also the multifarious tapestry of which memory is woven. On the one hand, there is the heroism of the victims with due respect and admiration at its core; on the other, the suffering of innocent women, children, and elderly which arouses pain and grief among those who remember. On the one hand, Armenian remembrance conjures up a sense of superiority over the Turks with their “barbaric,” “animalistic” nature; on the other, there is recognition of the Turks’ clever calculations which lead to a strong international position and to the increasing success of their propaganda. Then there is another paradox: Armenians feel lonely and abandoned in their memory, and no longer look to others (who have already failed the Armenians many times); but again, Armenians cling to the hope that the suffering of others will open the eyes of the world to the Armenian Medz Yeghern and that the UN will eventually meet the expectations held of it. The contradiction is also visible in the Armenian approach to the mass atrocity crimes committed against others. There is a sensitivity to the losses of other groups, yet somehow those recurrently highlight the uniqueness of the Armenian situation. Finally, Armenians are convinced that, for success in advancing their case, they need to act as one coherent group – and yet are unable to overcome internal differences.

Conclusion

Described herein have been the emergence and shape of the cultural memory and the process of cultural trauma construction within the Armenian community in the United States leading up to the 50^th anniversary of the Medz Yeghern. Discussed were the quickly evolving representations in the form of commemorative editorials in English-language Armenian weeklies from the 1930s until the mid-1960s. Press narratives published systematically over these decades were tangible traces of the cultural memory of the genocide, available also to a non-Armenian reader. The inscription of these Armenian collective traumas across these pages was to reinforce meanings internally and occupy an American space externally.

The example of trauma that I have discussed here sheds new light on the issue of the exteriorization of collective memory. The unveiling of a group’s tragic past before the general public does not seem to be determined exclusively (as cultural trauma theorists postulate) by the designation of a given event as “traumatic” and the reconstruction of a collective identity that needs to be manifested publicly (Alexander, 2012; Eyerman, 2002, 2004). Likewise, this penetration of collective memory into the mainstream is not solely dependent on the political opportunities that are given to a group by the elites and the authorities (as suggested by critics of the trauma concept) (Kansteiner, 2002). The findings of my analysis strengthen the argument that the unlocking of cultural trauma occurs under conditions of synergy and synchronization of, on the one hand, internal factors within the group itself (its needs, readiness, cohesiveness, etc.) to publicly express their claims, and, on the other hand, external factors stimulating and enabling the group to formulate its demands officially.

The necessity of a convergence of these circumstances is particularly evident when we look at the attempts Armenians had been undertaking prior to the 1960s. Especially the late 1940s seemed to be the moment when the genocide could have easily reappeared in the mainstream. After the Shoah, after the forging of the term and definition of “genocide,” after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the nature of the Armenian experience was unambiguous for the Armenian leadership (and others). Armenians had been subjected to genocide, and no one had been held liable. It appeared that justice would be a matter of time. However, the Armenian-American community was not ready at all. Moreover, the Cold War not only divided Armenian-Americans among themselves but, above all, consumed the energy of world leaders in the construction of new political, economic, and military alliances, effectively drawing their attention away from human rights violated decades earlier. Armenians, who from the 1930s to the 1960s were denied the world’s attention, only managed to speak out when encouraged by advantageous external conditions. In the United States, these included the protests of other minorities and persecuted groups as well as the gradual emergence of the Holocaust in the mainstream (even though, as demonstrated, the commemorative culture of the Armenian genocide existed long before the emergence of the Shoah discourse).

Furthermore, also casting a different light on statements by supporters of this concept, the institutionalization of cultural trauma does not always go hand in hand with the deprivation of memory of its sacredness and emotionality (typical of the pre and early-ritual phase) (Alexander, 2012). The case at hand demonstrates how nonrecognition and consecutive denial can be an effective barrier against memory losing its initial impulsiveness (manifested, for instance, in the language Armenians used vis-à-vis the Turks).

The example of the genocide discussed herein also shows that memories of a traumatic event can quickly penetrate the sphere of culture, but remain closed for longer in the narrow framework of a specific community. As survivor/refugee tongues differed from the ones used in their new homelands, initially no one from the outside could access these memories. The message encrypted in Armenian language, reserved for “members only,” did not yet contain memoirs or direct accounts: the content was dressed in prose and poetry as if these terrifying things that happened were not a reality but literary fiction. Enclosing the memories within the community framework led to the emergence of a gap between different dimensions of cultural memory.

This had far-reaching consequences, including an almost complete lack of representation of the genocide in the public domain of the new diaspora countries – a representation that would be designed by Armenians chiefly for non-Armenians. ³² As a result, when, after the Holocaust, the crime of genocide got its name, the average Armenian-American did not employ this new instrument in practice to remind the world of the Armenian experience of genocide. The majority of those who clearly understood that the Medz Yeghern was inscribed within the definition of the newly created and adopted legal term did not perceive it as their responsibility to reinsert the topic into the mass culture agenda. As their genocide had remained so long in the private and ethnic community spheres, it took time as well as efforts by the leadership for Armenians to realize their collective duty to publicize the Turkish transgressions, or – to use Alexander’s formulation – to institutionalize “the lessons of the trauma” (Alexander, 2012: 27). As of 1965, the process of meaning-making (traced through the editorials from two Armenian-American newspapers) gradually built a bridge over the representation gap in the American public space.

The uni-dimensionality of the Armenian memory throughout the first decades after the genocide is also noticeable in the language with which Armenians referred to their oppressors. Dehumanizing and demeaning terms (i.e., “barbaric Turk,” “uncivilized people,” “wild beast from the jungle,” “predator tribe,” “the unspeakable Turk,” etc.) on newspaper pages indicate that, as long as they were closed within a communal framework, the discussions around the Medz Yeghern went unchallenged by outsiders. Initially, the Turk was the pure personification of a butcher. Later, in publicizing the genocide among the general public, the diaspora Armenians were forced to select their words more carefully: they could not antagonize the rest of society, but instead needed to win social and moral acceptance for their claim.

Another consequence of embedding memory within a narrow community framework was that, after the adoption of the last postwar treaty in the early 1920s, there was no discussion on the co-responsibility of other states. Accordingly, Armenians remained marked for decades by the stigma of being a victim and a martyr, of being uprooted and stateless. This (among other factors) robbed them of possibilities to exert their right to justice. De-stigmatization began in the mid-1960s when Armenians rejected their previous self-perception as a humiliated and inferior people. They publicly recognized themselves as a nation and publicly demanded punishment for the guilty.

Nonetheless, released from an overwhelming sense of shame in being a victim, Armenians paradoxically became marked even stronger by the stigma of victimhood. The contradiction in terms fundamentally concerns the fact that, by placing the genocide at the heart of their public, collective identity, Armenians made everyone else look at them through the lens of that persecution. The opening of Armenian memory to the outside concurrently led to the categorization of Armenians as sufferers by the media and other observers. Still, this further obliged Armenian-Americans, rousing them to act as defenders of this hallowed cause.