CRITICAL TIMES | 3:2 | AUGUST 2020 DOI 10 . 1215/26410478-8517751 | © 2020 Deniz Yonucu and Talin Suciyan This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 300 From the Ottoman Empire to Post-1923 The Catastrophe as Seen by the Angel of History DENIZ YONUCU and TALIN SUCIYAN abstract The author of The Armenians in Modern Turkey, historian Talin Suciyan, puts the Armenian genocide survivors at the center of her research to provide a new perspective on the history of the Turk- ish Republic. Suciyan analyzes the experiences and lives of its Armenian population several decades a  . I  , D Y a  Sa   a a a anthrohistorical approach to understanding the paths that led to the annihilation of Armenians, the       T, a  a   a      a aa   . T survivor as described in this interview is nei- ther a wretched of the earth, who is forced to live a tortured life, nor a subaltern whose voice cannot acquire speech. The survivor instead is an existence whose past, present and future is constantly denied, and therefore robbed from her. keywords survivor, Angel of History, Otto man History, Armenians in post-genocide Turkey, denial habitus A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fxedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. —Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” thesis 9. Historian Talin Suciyan’s frst book, The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-genocide Society, Politics, and History, was originally published in English in 2015 and later published in Turkish by Aras Publishing in 2018. 1 From archival documents and a large number of never-utilized Armenian and Turkish primary sources—including memoirs and diaries—Suciyan argues that the Armenian genocide did not end: Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times/article-pdf/3/2/300/829128/300yonucu.pdf by guest on 21 March 2021