This large sign greets passers-by as they walk from the KaDeWe, Berlin’s top department store, into the Wittenberg Platz U-Bahn.
That’s more or less equivalent to outside Selfridges in London or Galeries Lafayette in Paris.
The words at the top say ‘Places of terror that we must never forget’.
Berlin confronts its history boldly and openly, from the memorials to murdered Jews and Gypsies, to the carefully preserved sites of Stasi terror during the division of Germany.
The centenary of the Armenian Genocide in April 2015 has seen a deluge of online publications about the events of 1915. But there wasn’t always such a plethora of materials. I became interested in the Armenian question in the seventies, but there was very little scholarly literature available. I was saved by the 1976 Minority Rights Group Report on the Armenians, and I got hold of copy, I think by sending away for it. It was somehow lost during house moves over the decades, but I was delighted to find this week that it is available to download on the Minority Rights Group website, along with a 1987 update.
It is still an impressive document, but what I’d forgotten on a rereading was that there had been virtual silence on the Armenian question from 1923 until 1965. As the report says, ‘It suited all parties to keep quiet’ – and this included the USSR. How things have changed!
I was also rash enough to try to learn some Armenian in 1976. The only guide I could find was a grammar book in French. I decided that if I translated it into English, I’d learn some Armenian on the way. The picture is a page of my translation.
Forty years on, I’m writing a novel that is in part a homage to the Armenians. The amount of research material is almost overwhelming – a long way from the days when a scholar in London sent off a stamped addressed envelope and a postal order to obtain the MRG report. Download it and see what you think.
Stuart Campbell author 