Imagining Human Rights

Oliver Kohns

The Aesthetics of Human Rights in Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

Franz Werfel’s novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, originally published in German in 1933, is not just as a novel about systematic violations of human rights, but above all as a political intervention, in the form of a novel, on behalf of the fundamental rights of a certain group of human beings – in this case, the Armenians. The genocide of the Armenians at the hands of the fading Ottoman Empire during the First World War forms the historical backdrop to the novel. According to estimates by the historian Michael Mann, between 1.2 and 1.4 million Armenians were killed in 1915 and 1916 – that is, probably two thirds of the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire ...