For a country which has faced crimes against the Jews during the Second World War with humility, and spared no effort to pay for its past mistakes, Germany remains reluctant and even unwilling to recognize the Armenian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey in 1915. But for a handful of activists, this hesitation which some see as nothing but procrastination on the part of the German government has only increased their determination despite a certain degree of apathy from large segments of the Armenian Diaspora in Germany.
"We are not arguing over historical facts. Germany and Ottoman Turkey fought on the same side in World War I. German officers were stationed in Ottoman Turkey as advisers. There were no secrets between them, but despite all that, we have not been able to penetrate the barrier of official German recognition," said Dr. Tessa Hofmann, one of the many supporters of the Armenian Cause in Germany who has tirelessly pursued the question of recognition since 1972.
But she, like many other Germans and Armenians including her close associate Gerayer Koucharian, is not a lobbyist.
"There is no Armenian lobby, at least not in the same context as you understand the term when you talk about political action in the United States," she explained in a recent interview.
In a letter addressed to a "Day for Armenia" conference in Paris this year, Koucharian outlined some of the progress along with the hurdles facing the passage of an Armenian Genocide resolution by the German government.
In ongoing and often informal discussions with Parliamentarians, many Armenians have concluded that the German side would rather avoid direct involvement in the question of recognition.
One "test balloon" often floated by some German officials suggested that maybe they should take up the question of Genocide recognition with their counterparts I in Turkey. Another "test balloon" or concept advocated that Turkey and Armenia hold bilateral talks on the issue.
"Can it be easy? Would German politicians honestly recommend the Jewish community to discuss the Holocaust with neo-Nazi negotiators? Germany was Turkey's most important military ally during the First World War and its diplomats knew better about the Armenian Genocide than those of any other country," Koucharian told the conference.
As Koucharian and many others see it, German recognition could be by far more important than that of any other European country.
"As we can see, Germany has many good reasons to study a forgotten part of its own history more closely. Germany played a special role and it holds a special responsibility for both Turks and Armenians," he said.
In recent years, a number of mostly German Armenian organizations have united under the banner of what they have named the "Working Group for Affirmation" a term they prefer to use instead of recognition to approach the German authorities with a unified voice.
In a petition to the German Parliament last year, the umbrella group which includes the Central Council of Armenians in Germany, the Institute for the Armenian Questions, and the Center for Information and Documentation on Armenia, appealed to the legislators to not only condemn the Genocide but also call upon the German government and Parliament to recognize the Genocide as well.
Moving on two fronts, the recognition "battle" is being fought through the German Foreign Office and the German Parliament, where one legislator is actively involved in getting the necessary votes to bring the issue to the floor for open discussion.
"A debate on the issue will be an excellent starting point because it will give us a chance to get to some of the World War I archives of the Foreign Office which are full of first hand evidence regarding the events relating to the Armenian Genocide," Dr. Hofmann said.
But the effort was short lived.
In a statement issued on October 10 this year, the German Bundestag (Parliament) said it was shelving the Armenian petition to avoid impeding the work of the recently-formed and often controversial Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC).
"The German decision is a big blow, but the unfortunate part is that it was an Armenian-American organization that in effect gave the Germans the excuse they needed to pull back and shelve the Genocide recognition issue," an Armenian community activist said.
As much as the creation of TARC effectively torpedoed the Genocide recognition efforts of the Armenian community of Germany, it also gave Turkey at least one victory with the European Parliament.
On October 25, the Parliament adopted a resolution which for the first time in years failed to mention the recognition of the Armenian Genocide as one of the conditions Turkey has to fulfill before joining the European Union. The reason: Avoid preempting the work of the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission.
Angered by the unexpected turn of events, the Forum of Armenian Associations of Europe, which includes members from 18 European countries, called on the "Armenian members of TARC to resign and thus put an end to the work of the Commission."
But despite the apparent setbacks, community activists say their efforts will not stop.
Valuable research to date by another scholar, Dr. Wolfgang Gust, has already been published in the form of collection of documents, but a lot more still remains under lock and key at the Foreign office.
Action on the Parliamentary front may have gotten a boost because of the support from a German-based.
Turkish human rights group, "TUDAY", and such well known scholars like Prof. Yahuda Bauer of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, and Prof. Israel Charny, the Executive Director of the Institute on Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem.
"We collected 13,200 signatures in support of our petition, but unfortunately only one third of those who signed were Armenians. The rest were mainly Turkish residents of Germany," she said.
One such group which supported the petition was the Association of Opponents to Genocide which was founded in 1998 and consists of Turkish citizens living in Germany. The same Association has sent a similar petition to the Turkish Parliament but received no response.
Dr. Hofmann was reluctant to explain the disparity in the ratio of the signatures on an issue so important to Armenians, saying only that most Armenians were "hesitant and don't want to aggravate not only the German authorities, but Turkey as well."
While an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 Armenians live in Germany, the absolute majority are not German citizens, but rather "resident aliens." A large number of them are still Turkish citizens.
"Maybe they are afraid that pushing for a Genocide resolution will have an adverse effect on fellow Armenians in Turkey. Maybe they don't want to get involved for fear that Germany might feel offended because of the passive German role at the time of the Armenian Genocide. The end result is the same, we do not have the support we need from the Armenians here," she said.
"The situation might have been different if all Armenians living here were German citizens. It is always easier to get politically involved if you are a citizen of a country."
But Germany, with very strict naturalization laws, does not allow dual citizenship, and unlike the United States for example, there is no such thing as automatically getting German citizenship simply because a child is born on German soil.
"It's a long and difficult process. A change in status is hard. A guest worker is and often remains a guest worker despite the fact that he is classified a legal resident alien," a longtime resident explained.
"Let's not forget that until the mid-1980's a resident alien could not even have his own business. At least that part of the law has changed, and some of us can now go into private business," he said.
True that the Armenians have settled down, and even integrated into society, but political action is still not easy.
Matters are further complicated by the presence of an estimated 2.5 million Turks who began settling in Germany since 1965 when the German government invited them as "guest workers." "The presence of such a large Turkish population, along with the good relations between Turkey and Germany, is not helping our efforts," said Dr. Hofmann, who is a recipient of the AGBU Garbis Papazian Award for her work on Armenian issues.
While the "Working Group Affirmation" presses ahead with its efforts on the political front, Dr. Mihran Dabagh of the Institute for Diaspora and Genocide Studies is busy on an intellectual level, elevating the issue from its purely historical perspective to a "social and behavioral issue and more importantly its impact on the new generation of Armenians in the Diaspora itself."
Dr. Dabagh, who heads a think-tank team of seven researchers and a number of interns at the prestigious Bochum University, has spent years documenting with a past grant from the Armenian General Benevolent Union - the traumatic effects of the Genocide on surviving Armenians.
Between 1990 and 1998, German educated Dr. Dabagh, an Armenian who was born in the Turkish city of Diarbekir, and his team have interviewed some on tape and others on video more than 140 Genocide survivors living in Germany, France, Cyprus, Holland and several other countries.
"We took a different approach in these interviews. More than just concentrating on facts of what happened, we have tried to understand the state of mind of the survivors, their trauma.
"As far as I am concerned, we have long passed the phase of whether the Genocide took place or not. That is a historical fact, and there is ample evidence to support it.
"If we want to move forward, we need to understand why it happened. I don't agree with the Turkish explanation that the killings were just a result of a conflict, or a war," Dabagh said during an hour long discussion with this reporter.
"The element of premeditation is important. I see it as what you might call the result of a relationship between a gardener and his garden. The gardener decides on his own what flowers and plants he wants in his garden. He gets rid of what he does not want, and that's not of any fault of the plants he destroys.
"This is what Ottoman Turkey did. It just cleaned its garden of all the Armenians," Dabagh explained.
From his point of view, proving this relationship between the Ottoman state and its Armenian subjects is key to future success in bringing Germany closer to a full recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
"Germany has been able to deal with its national guilt after World War II, maybe it too saw what happened to the Jews from the same perspective as that of the gardener and his garden. I am not here to analyze the German mind, but the Armenian Genocide is also a unique experience. It should not be dealt with only from a political perspective," he said.
Another scholar involved with the Armenian Genocide issue is Raffi Kantian, a leading force behind the German-Armenian Society and Hanover-based editor of its literary and research publication Armenisch-Deutsche Korrespondenz (ADK).
"We are in the information age and our magazine has played an important role in reaching out to the various political circles in Germany, especially those involved in foreign affairs. As for the German-Armenian Society, its nearly 280 members are evenly divided between Armenians and Germans," Kantian said.
The Society this year hosted a meeting on the question of Turkish-Armenian dialogue and organized several seminars and symposiums on the Armenian Genocide.
Kantian, who holds a university degree in chemistry, has written extensively on various Armenian issues and translated a number of Armenian books into German.
"We have to educate the public and raise the level of their awareness. We need to build our power base through the dissemination of more information and knowledge," he said.
Across Germany, intellectuals and academicians like Dr. Hofmann and Koucharian in Berlin, Dr. Dabagh in Bochum, and Kantian in Hanover are playing a valuable role in the effort to get Germany to at least take a closer look at the Genocide question.
"We can do so much as intellectuals. What we need is more grass-root involvement, but the Armenian community in Germany is still relatively new and the majority stay away from all things political. It is a slow process, but we have built a strong enough foundation. We are moving ahead," said Kantian.
