| Abstrakt: |
From 1915-23, approximately 1.5 million Armenians died in Ottoman Turkey in what has been called the first genocide of the twentieth century. As a proportion of the total population of Armenians, the events of 1915 claimed the lives of about one-half the population living in Turkey and approximately one-third of the worldwide population of Armenians. This article examines the ways in which the trauma of this genocide has affected the identity of survivors, including their children and grandchildren. To interpret the radical commitment to the Armenian cause in purely psychological terms is to ignore a level of moral discourse that must be included in the analysis, if only because those who engage in terrorist acts usually understand their own actions in moral terms. The traumatic events become the template through which generations relate to each other and through which group self-understanding evolves. These events are the object of interpretation, reinterpretation, dispute, rejection, embrace, and⁄or denial. Grandparents are primary carriers and transmitters of collective group memories. Grandparents symbolize the past to grandchildren, and in this regard their task is to embody the heritage, the collective memory of the family or group. |
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