Sometimes it might seem that this blog is side-stepping, even to myself, but then I recall the ‘gap’ is also always been about the gap in general and any meaning and as well especially about media.
| One could now wonder why especially Germany produced and aired an ambitious TV-documentary about the Armenian genocide. Though seeing this carefully done, well casted and accurately documented movie the other night was what it had been described as: a painful lesson about a still widely unacknowledged part of history.
To promote it here, is not only due to the striking quality of the documentary by documentary filmmaker Eric Friedler, who had known German actors to read and re-enact through historical documents witnesses of the Armenian tragedy. |
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| It is a disconcerting experience of ‘re-animation’, which according to the filmmaker had been necessary as “[t]he development of modern media, arrived 20 years too late for the examination of this genocide.”
But there are contemporary witnesses, Germans and Americans, in particular, whose accounts and correspondence are preserved in archives, where they have been studied mainly by specialists until now. The same spiegelonline article, who provides this insight material also introduced me to the fact that also Germany ‘still has not officially recognized the Armenian genocide. In 2005, the German parliament, the Bundestag, called upon Turkey to acknowledge its “historical responsibility,” but it avoided using word “genocide.”‘ I guess it makes some sense to bring the theme finally up this media-wise way, as we all know that Turkey wants 1) become an EU member and 2) among Germany’s migrant communities, the Turkish are the biggest group. So there is enough reason to finally discuss the issue – though or may be even because Germans themselves have their “historical responsibility” … |
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The film ‘Aghet – Ein Völkermord‘ will be aired again by the German TV station phoenix on April 13th, 8:15 pm, which is even at prime time.
German info site at NDR
