A Landmark Trial and the Origins of Genocide as a Legal Category

These were the words uttered by the twenty-four-year-old Soghomon Tehlirian to a packed court in Berlin, as he stood on the stand on 21 June 1921 on trial for killing Talat Paşa, leader of the Young Turks, Minister of Internal Affairs during World War I, and chief architect and executioner of the Armenian Genocide. Spoken by the man who shot Talat with a single bullet to the head in daylight in Berlin, these words would resonate across national borders and through decades of legal scholarship. The apparent discrepancy between owning up to a killing and disavowing the act as murder constituted a key dilemma for legal scholar Raphael Lemkin (Reference Lemkin and Frieze2013) and philosopher Hannah Arendt (Reference Arendt and Amos2006[1961]). Both would mull over how to assess an individual act of retribution in the absence of legal accountability for mass violence perpetrated by sovereign states. Lemkin’s musings would eventually lead to his coinage of the term “genocide,” now an internationally recognized legal category to define mass murder targeting a national, racial, ethnic, or religious group and codified as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.Footnote ⁷

But Tehlirian’s words were momentous from the moment he uttered them. The New York Times described the proceedings as “Berlin’s most picturesque and most sensational criminal trial in years.”Footnote ⁸ In the courtroom were well-known public figures who also testified as expert witnesses: General Liman von Sanders, the German Commander in Chief stationed in Ottoman territory at the time of the genocide and implicated in potential complicity; Reverend Grigoris Balakian, one of the few who had survived the first wave of arrests of more than two hundred fifty Armenian community leaders in Istanbul on 24 April 1915; and J. Lepsius, a Protestant missionary who witnessed and documented the atrocities. Tehlirian’s own legal defense team was composed of Berlin’s most famous criminal lawyers. The audience extended beyond the confines of the courtroom, and included Armenians scattered around the world who held their breath with the expectation that some justice might be restored. The trial took place in that brief interlude when Armenians were hopeful for retributive justice in the immediate aftermath of World War I, from which the entente powers had emerged victorious, and just before the treaty of Lausanne in 1923 which dashed those hopes (Ekmekcioglu Reference Ekmekcioglu2013). The audience also included officials of the Turkish government keen to thwart any counter to the wheels of denialism they had already set in motion. Finally, it included German government officials who worried that evidence might come to light that exposed German officials had collaborated in the deportations, labor camps, and massacres (Ihrig Reference Ihrig2016). The stakes of Tehlirian’s trial thus traversed the gamut from individual suffering and demands for retribution to national guilt, complicity, and denial.

“From a legal point of view,” the District Attorney for the prosecution, Mr. Gollnick, summed up on the second and last day of the trial, “the case is quite simple”:

To argue his case that the killing was premeditated, political, and without attenuating circumstances, District Attorney Gollnick piled one piece of incriminating evidence upon another. Had not Tehlirian said, during his preliminary interrogation by the police inspector (even if he subsequently retracted the statement in the official record), “As soon as I saw my parents’ home in ruins, I wanted to avenge their deaths. In order to do that, I went and bought a pistol”? Had he not carefully mapped his itinerary across Europe to find Talat, sorting out his travel documents along the way with suspicious ease and sense of direction, to finally arrive in Berlin? Had he not, once he located with certainty that Talat resided in 4 Hardenbergstrasse, abruptly moved out of the flat he was renting at the time and taken up residence right across from Talat’s apartment, even though he would still have to pay the remaining rent on his former lease? Had he not instantly grabbed his pistol upon spotting Talat from the window where he must have kept constant watch, the pistol conveniently located in his suitcase, ready to be reached for when the right moment came? (Yeghiayan Reference Yeghiayan2006: 123–30).

As the District Attorney thus sought to prove long-term planning and cool-headed calculation, he also pointed to Tehlirian’s temperament to bolster his case, rhetorically asking: “Was the defendant bad-tempered or easily provoked? The evidence is to the contrary. He was a gloomy and calm man, wrapped up in himself. He was not one to dance with joy and have fits of passion…. On the contrary, he was one who kept his thoughts to himself to a point where he would calmly analyze them and take action.” He supported this assertion by citing testimonies of Tehlirian’s Berlin neighbors and acquaintances who had heard him tinkering on his mandolin and the sad Armenian songs he listened to alone in his room, or who had witnessed his fainting on a dance floor where his Armenian comrades had taken him in an attempt to dispel the melancholy that seemed to perpetually envelope him. “The motive of the defendant,” Gollnick concluded, “was to get revenge through killing Talat, who he was convinced was the instigator and the perpetrator of the massacres of the Armenians” (ibid.: 127).

The defense, in turn, built the legal foundation of their case on Article 51 of the German code that prevailed at the time of the hearings: “A homicide should go unpunished when the defendant committed the act unknowingly or when he commits the act under the influence of moral anguish that he no longer has control over his free will” (ibid.). Of the five doctors who testified, all but one granted the possibility that Tehlirian’s free will was significantly diminished. A more cautious Dr. Liepmann, a privy medical counselor of the court from the University of Berlin, suggested, “There were motives of suffering which put pressure on the defendant and limited his free will” (ibid.: 112), while a more confident Dr. Haake, a neurologist, declared, “An emotional epileptic, such as the defendant, is unable freely to control his will under the constraint of such mental images. I would… give an affirmative answer to the question, Was there a total lack of free will?” (ibid.: 120). All concurred with the diagnosis of Tehlirian as epileptic.Footnote ⁹ They pointed out, however, that because his epileptic attacks were induced differently from the prevailing textbook definition, Tehlirian’s condition merited a different term: “psychological epilepsy.” The attacks were clearly triggered, they explained, when the patient encountered scenes or thoughts from his past. There was already an acknowledgment by these experts, then, of the peculiar nature to Tehlirian’s fainting spells. They foregrounded an emotional predicament, albeit one with legal ramifications, a predicament that transcended individual predisposition and gestured toward, even if it did not explicitly articulate, the notion of collective trauma.

Indeed, much of the rest of the trial was devoted to rendering Tehlirian’s horrific past as part of an episode of violence and trauma collectively experienced by Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman-Turkish government, thereby intertwining the legal question of free will with the political question of state-led mass murder. The crimes committed by members of the Committee of Union and Progress, commonly known as the Young Turks, were exposed through the testimonies from Tehlirian and other key witnesses who had survived the massacres. The latter were intended not only to corroborate Tehlirian’s account but also to communicate to the jury, and the wider national and international audience, the systematic and collective nature of the killings of Armenians across the entire Anatolian landscape in 1915 and throughout World War I.

On the trial’s first day, Presiding Justice of the District Court Dr. Lehmberg asked Tehlirian to narrate the murder of his family in detail. Although the New York Times reported that, at this point, “[Tehlirian’s] Oriental temperament got the better of him and he shrieked,” the court records give no indication that he lost his composure. They recount that Tehlirian, subdued and lucid, told the court that the news of deportations began to arrive in his hometown Erzincan in May of 1915, and that in early June everyone in their village was ordered to prepare to leave. The residents were assured that their money and valuables would be handed over to authorities for safekeeping. Three days later, everyone was “herded outside, and the line of people moved forward in caravans and convoys,” with soldiers on horseback and other gendarmes escorting the caravans. Once the convoy was some way from the city, they were ordered to stop. The gendarmes began to plunder the deportees. “During the plundering,” Tehlirian explained, “one of the gendarmes dragged away my sister, and my mother cried out, ‘please let me go blind.’” “I can’t remember that day anymore,” Tehlirian resumed. “I don’t want to keep on being reminded of that day. I’d rather die right now than continue describing that black day” (ibid.: 9).

But Justice Lehmberg insisted on hearing the details, so Tehlirian carried on, with mostly affirmative interjections from Lehmberg. “They took everyone away and struck me as well. Then I saw how my brother’s skull was split apart with an ax.… My mother fell.… I don’t know why, from a bullet or something else …. I was struck on the head and fell to the ground. I have no recollection of what happened afterwards.” After he regained consciousness, Tehlirian said, perhaps a day later, perhaps two, “I saw my brother’s body had fallen on top of me” (ibid.: 9–10). When asked how he had managed to escape, Tehlirian described a convoluted itinerary, first through the killing fields, then taking refuge in the mountains, and eventually finding his way back to his village nearly a year later, in March 1916. When he arrived there, he told the court, he found his house in ruins and no trace of any of his family. In his search for his parents and other siblings he hoped might have survived, he traveled to Istanbul to place inquiries. When he gave up any remaining hope, he moved first to Geneva and then to Berlin, trying to get as far away from the past as possible. But, Tehlirian insisted, he had no idea that Talat lived in Berlin when he arrived there.

The defense reiterated in their closing statement that when he accidentally found out that Talat was inhabiting the same city, Tehlirian did not even talk to his Armenian friends in Berlin about it. This was because, his attorneys explained, he was trying to put the encounter out of his mind. The defense underscored that this “chance encounter” with Talat “did not make [Tehlirian] decide to kill Talat” (ibid.: 137). While it might have been the case, the defense team granted, that Tehlirian was truly overwhelmed by his feelings upon discovering that he inhabited the same city with the ex-minister, at that time he had no thought of killing him. It was only upon a visitation by his mother’s ghost, attorney Werthauer averred, that Tehlirian first thought of revenge: “The deep feelings he experienced then passed. He remained calm, and thoughts of vengeance did not recur to him. He carried on as before until five to six weeks later, when he saw a dream, materially almost like a vision. His mother’s corpse arose before him. He told her: ‘I saw Talat.’ His mother answered, ‘You saw Talat and you did not avenge your mother’s, father’s, brother’s, and sister’s murders? You are no longer my son’” (ibid.: 137). The jury of twelve gave their verdict as “not guilty,” and Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted.

The Ghost in the Courtroom

The existing scholarship on Tehlirian’s trial has already established the significance of the trial as a milestone in thinking about questions of national sovereignty, international accountability, and legal retribution in the face of state-sponsored mass atrocities against specific groups of citizens: at the time of the hearings, there was no existing legal procedure to prosecute state-orchestrated mass murder or even a common legal vocabulary to talk about it. Although the official purpose of the Tehlirian trial was not to seek justice for victims of the massacres or to resolve the legal question of international accountability, the hearings did ultimately turn into a platform for exposing and thinking about collective murder by a sovereign state. In his concluding remarks, Defense Attorney Werthauer asked, “Of all the juries in the world which one would have convicted Tell if he had shot his arrow at Gessler?” (Yeghiayan Reference Yeghiayan2006: 161). And to make sure that the broader significance of the Tell analogy was not lost on the spectators, he added, “Is there a more humanitarian act than that which has been described in this courtroom?” (ibid.: 161).

It was not just the rhetorical strategies of the defense team that equated Tehlirian’s act to one of morality and conscience. A near age-mate of Tehlirian at the time, long before his rise to world fame as the coiner of the term genocide, was the Polish legal scholar Rafael Lemkin. Then a law student, Lemkin was ardently following the trial, if only from a distance. In his autobiographical account, Totally Unofficial, published near the end of his life, Lemkin (Reference Lemkin and Frieze2013) recalled that it was Tehlirian’s trial that first made him to ponder the tension between the breach of the existing legal order by an individual taking it upon themselves to seek justice and the ethical and legal imperative to punish mass murder committed by sovereign states that were not held accountable within that order. Lemkin said he became preoccupied with the conundrum of acting “as the self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind” (ibid.: 20). Cautious as he was regarding the implications of exonerating self-appointed restorers of justice, he also deeply empathized with Tehlirian’s predicament. It made Lemkin “feel that a law against this type of mass racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world” (ibid.: 20). That feeling solidified into a legal agenda that he resolutely began to pursue just five years later, when Shalom Schwartzbard shot the Ukrainian minister of war, Symon Petliuria, for the mass murder of Jews. Hannah Arendt (Reference Arendt and Amos2006), too, considered the killings by Schwartzbard and Tehlirian to be similar. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, as Arendt came down on the side of Schwartzbard, who had lost all fifteen members of his family, she invoked Tehlirian. He, too, had been “forced,” in Arendt’s words, “to take the law into his own hands” given that he “was a member of an ethnic group that did not possess its own state and legal system” (ibid.: 265). Recently, historian Carolyn Dean (Reference Dean2019) has taken issue with such treatment of Tehlirian or Schwartzbard as heroes who did the work of justice, a dissenting view I engage with at the end of this article.Footnote ¹⁰ But analysts of the Berlin trial, whether sympathetic to or critical of Tehlirian’s acquittal, have not given due attention to the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother, whose absent presence hovers over and ultimately sways the hearings.Footnote ¹¹

In his closing speech, the Defense Attorney circled back to Tehlirian’s initial account of the visitation of his mother’s ghost, recalling her to convince the jury that the killing was not premeditated but triggered by Tehlirian’s haunting. But rather than simply offering the vision as proof of Tehlirian’s psychological condition, the attorney spoke at curious length about the ghost. He described the appearance of the ghost “materially, almost like a vision” (ibid.: 136). As he elaborated on the vision, Von Gordon walked a tightrope: he sought to impress upon the jury the force of the vision without entirely jettisoning the “superiority” of Western legal rationality. “It is quite evident,” he proposed at one point, taking an abrupt culturalist turn in his argumentation, “that such visions play an altogether different role in the lives of spirited Easterners than they do in the lives of us Westerners who look upon such things from a philosophical and medical point of view.” He continued, “I remind you of the passage from the Holy Bible which reads: ‘And the angel appeared to him in his dream.…’ A similar apparition or corporeal vision is what had the decisive effect on Tehlirian…. At that moment, the defendant wanted to kill Talat” (ibid.: 137).

Consider the deft maneuver here: the Defense Attorney marks Tehlirian’s worldview as that of a “spirited Easterner,” decidedly different from the “lives of us Westerners.” In the first instance, Von Gordon appeals to cultural otherness as an ameliorating factor: they are not as secular or rational as we are in the West, so we have to evaluate their actions not based on our own terms but on their terms. And yet, Von Gordon’s move is different from the essentializing version of cultural relativism whereby those different from the observing self are cast as the non-comparable or untranslatable Other. Rather, immediately after assigning Tehlirian to the Easterner slot, Von Gordon proceeds to remind the court of a passage from the Holy Bible: “and the angel appeared to him in his dream.” Tehlirian may be a spirited Easterner, but his cosmology is not entirely alien to those attending the Berlin court. As fellow Christians, the audience is assumed to share an understanding of angels and corporeal visions. Despite his disavowal that “us Westerners” are not at the mercy of apparitions, Van Gordon goes on to reaffirm the relevance and power of the spectral in the very next breath through evoking the Holy Bible.

The historical context was crucial for the success of this double move of estrangement and familiarization. In addition to spiritualism being still widespread in Europe in 1921 and the formidable legacy of ghosts in Christian belief and practice, the European public was particularly preoccupied with ghostly sightings in the immediate aftermath of World War I (Davies Reference Davies2018). There was a spike in the circulation of supernatural encounters among soldiers, which Owen Davies explains by the existing Catholic and Orthodox credence in guardian angels, along with Protestant groups’ endorsements of such sightings as an expression of God’s continued intervention in human affairs. This fascination with the supernatural also manifested itself in the abundance of literary references where ghosts played a leading role (ibid.: 53–65). Indeed, in his Hamlet in Purgatory, literary critic and cultural historian Stephen Greenblatt (Reference Greenblatt2013) argues that the Protestant denunciation of the idea of Purgatory, so central in Catholic belief and rituals around death and the afterlife, was also an attempt to curb the Renaissance belief in ghosts. But secularizing efforts never succeeded in eliminating intimacy with specters or other enchanted things. Rather, the fascination with ghosts remained submerged in the public psyche and still appealed to the Elizabethan audience in a variety of forms: “as vengeful familial spirits, as emblems of conscience, and agents of redemption” (ibid.: 199). Furthermore, Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare himself never quite came down on either pure skepticism or full-fledged belief with regard to the spectral; the audience was “invited to credit their existence in a peculiar spirit of theatrical disavowal” (ibid.: 196).

Taking my cue from Greenblatt, I submit that Attorney Van Gordon’s appeal to the jury regarding the ghost was not dissimilar to the invitation extended by Shakespeare, except now the stage of theatre has been replaced by the stage of the court.Footnote ¹² The defense used the ghostly visions to give insight to Tehlirian’s very core, one untarnished by calculation or caution: while the ghost made Tehlirian lose control and abandon the path of rationality, it also represented everything that was authentic and unfiltered about him.

I am not suggesting that the ghost was the only reason for Tehlirian’s acquittal. As has already been well-documented, there were other crucial factors that weighed in his favor. The jury was reminded, for example, that a post-World War I tribunal in Istanbul had already convicted Talat of war crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death in absentia. Furthermore, during the hearings, three other key witnesses had given testimonies to expose the full extent of the atrocities from death marches, kidnapping, and rape to labor camps, torture, murder, and the mutilation of corpses. Finally, Germany had its own interest in acquitting Tehlirian to ward off charges of complicity for the mass atrocities (Dadrian Reference Dadrian1996; Ihrig Reference Ihrig2016; Moses Reference Moses2012). In that regard, the last sentence of Defense Attorney Niemayer’s closing speech is telling: “In the East and all over the world, we Germans have been held responsible with the Turks for the crimes committed against the Armenians. If a German court were to find Soghomon Tehlirian not guilty, this would put an end of the misconception that the world has of us” (Yeghiayan Reference Yeghiayan2006: 176).

Nonetheless, the mother’s ghost appeared in the trial’s most decisive moments. Not only did the ghost provide the elusively solid foundation on which to establish Tehlirian’s lack of free will and the authenticity of his motivation, but the timing of the apparitions was critical to making sense of why Tehlirian acted when he did in the face of an otherwise confusing chronology of events. Ostensibly to clarify the confusion in Tehlirian’s account with regard to premeditation, Von Gordon asked, “Did I understand correctly that after finding the apartment in H. in order to be close to Talat, the defendant afterwards at times dropped the idea because the thought occurred to him: you cannot kill another person?!” He then answered his own rhetorical question to drive home the point of the power the ghost had over an otherwise reluctant Tehlirian: “To put it briefly: did this decision he made after the spirit appearance stay firm, or did he sometimes drop it and then devote himself to his usual occupations, because he said to himself: you cannot kill someone?” Presiding Judge Lemberg responded in support of Von Gordon’s emphasis on a hesitant Tehlirian: “That’s indeed what he said; he wavered in his decision.” And Tehlirian put the final knot on the presentation of a self who, against all his inclinations, did what he did because of the haunting: “I did waver. Whenever I felt sick, I wanted to honor my mother’s command. But when I was well again, I said to myself: you cannot really kill someone.” The distinction between the linear logic of rational decision making and the asynchronous logic of haunting was effectively blurred by Tehlirian and the defense team because, despite law’s disavowals of having anything to do with the spectral, they were able to tap into the Western cultural legacy of the ghost not merely as psychic disturbance but also as moral guide. To acknowledge that the ghost plays a critical role in the staging of Tehlirian’s defense, however, is not to reduce the ghost in the courtroom to a purely instrumental performance by Tehlirian and the defense team. Such a reduction would be an impoverished reading of the extent of Tehlirian’s haunting and would also evade the epistemological and ethical question of how or if genocidal violence can be testified to.

Ghost or Phantom?

If the summoning powers of ghosts were unleashed in the Berlin court, on the Elizabethan stage, and on the battlefield, it took somewhat longer for the social sciences to engage with them. Anthropologists, intimately attuned to the life worlds of the people they work among, provided some of the earlier exceptions reaching back into the nineteenth century with work on ancestral spirit possession to more recent engagements with ghosts (see, for example, Akin Reference Akin, Mageo and Howard1996; Ivy Reference Ivy1995; Ong 1988’ Semerdjian Reference Semerdjian2022; Weller Reference Weller1994). Thanks to Nobel Laurate novelist and essayist Toni Morrison and the pioneering work of critical race theorists, the spectral now claims formidable space across the social sciences and the humanities.Footnote ¹³ Derrida has coined “hauntology” as a field in its own right. Playing on the homophony of the two terms—hauntology and ontology—Derrida’s (Reference Derrida1994) hauntology engages questions of being and presence but provocatively splits from ontology in shifting the focus away from presence and toward that which is neither present nor absent—the zone between visibility and invisibility, life and death. Adopting a hauntological perspective does not require one to believe in ghosts but it does demand the recognition that “the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be” (Jameson Reference Jameson1995: 39).

There is, of course, more to the hauntological perspective than this minimal acknowledgment of the limitations of the available epistemologies we currently have at our disposal to fathom any of our given realities. Vinciane Despret (Reference Despret2019), for example, has recently called for ontological tact in relation to the claims made by the spirit mediums and the spirits of the dead. But it is the ethical and political component to hauntology that I am interested in here, following those scholars who wrest haunting out of the realm of individual psychology and situate it amid the violent legacy of modernity and nation-building, colonization and racialization, capitalism and dispossession. In this scholarship, haunting is also about how the legacy of violence continues to be central to contemporary relations of power and inequalities, as well as more recent engagements that center the uncanny and the phantomic as pivotal to questions of indigeneity and dispossession (Gordon Reference Gordon2008[1996]); Good Reference Good2020; Ginsburg Reference Ginsburg2018; Lincoln and Lincoln Reference Lincoln and Lincoln2015; Navaro Reference Navaro2012).

While there is broad agreement on the ethical and political stakes of utilizing a hauntological perspective, there is some divergence as to whether all specters are really ghosts. In their foundational work on trauma, haunting, and transgenerational communication, psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok (Reference Abraham and Torok1986) prioritize phantoms for the role they play in how “undisclosed traumas of previous generations might disturb the lives of their descendants even and especially if they know nothing about the distant causes” (quoted in Davis Reference Davis2005: 374). More specifically, phantoms lie. But the secrets of lying phantoms tend to remain unspeakable, according to Abraham and Torok’s culturally undifferentiated account, because of the sense of shame and prohibition that beset the haunted. That is why the goal of psychoanalysis is to uncover these secrets so that “the phantom and its noxious effects on the living can be exorcized” (ibid.: 378). By contrast, the key spectral figure in Derrida is not a toxic, lying phantom who needs to be exorcized for the haunted subject to start healing.Footnote ¹⁴ Rather, it is ghost whose secret “is not a puzzle to be solved; it is the structural openness or address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not yet formulated possibilities of the future” (ibid.: 378–79).

Is the spectral figure of Tehlirian’s mother a (Derridean) ghost or an (Abrams and Torokian) phantom? The mother’s ghost is not deceitful; she is speaking as a witness to the violence. Nor does she present a puzzle to be solved, at least not to Tehlirian, who entertains no doubt as to her true identity and the veracity of her message. While there is certainly a sense of shame in the ghost’s invocation, the shame does not stem from an untold secret but from the inaction she perceives on the part of Tehlirian against those guilty of the deeds that caused their family to perish. The specter that haunts Tehlirian does not lie: it is Tehlirian who “lies” in his legal testimony, as we shall shortly see in greater detail, in order to tell the truth of genocide. However, the motherly ghost is also different from the Derridean specter. The primary ethical injunction of the latter is to avoid the premature reduction of spectral encounters to an object of knowledge that can, and should, be defined, and instead learn to live with indeterminacy. By contrast, the ethical injunction of the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother is clear and conclusive: revenge.

But do we really have to choose between the ghost and the phantom? For Avery Gordon (Reference Gordon2008), who uses the terms interchangeably, the stakes go beyond either piercing through (the phantom’s) lies to reconcile with (one’s) truth or the aspiration to avoid closure of meaning altogether. Rather, engagement with specters is nothing less than a politics of justice, an investigation into the continuing repercussions of the past as they structure the present and the future. In Gordon’s words, “The ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice. Out of a concern for justice would be the only reason one would bother” (ibid.: 83–84). Byron Good (Reference Good2020) similarly juxtaposes this political turn with the earlier psychoanalytic angle of Abraham and Torok, but without replicating the ghost/phantom distinction. Good calls for a hauntological ethics, one that lets go of the assumption that we are rational subjects with immediate access to our thoughts, memories, and feelings and starts from a different assumption, that the self is already haunted and fundamentally flawed in terms of self-knowledge (ibid.: 423).

What would a hauntological ethics look like when a haunted self has such confidence over their self-knowledge that they purposefully fabricate a lie in order to convey their truth? I find that Good’s depiction of the haunted and barred self can accommodate a subject who purposefully fabulates. In fact, it is just this complex nature of a “lie” in the rendition of collective violence that informs my concept of empirical fabulation. I suggest that we can adequately reckon with the nature of the lie of his testimony, and the truth of genocide, only by simultaneously holding in tension Tehlirian as political actor in a quest for justice and Soghomon as haunted son under the spell of visions that induced his psychological epilepsy. To explore that tension, we need to turn to Tehlirian’s memoir.

Hamlet after Genocide

If Tehlirian’s testimony in court is the best-known instance of his empirical fabulation, a far less recognized but equally important source is his memoir, which remained untranslated for nearly a century after its first publication in Cairo in 1953.Footnote ¹⁵ I will now follow the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother as she makes her appearances throughout the memoir, Verhishumner, to show that, while empirical fabulation does not necessarily require a haunting, ghosts are particularly potent in illuminating what is empirical in empirical fabulation. While the hauntological perspective allowed me to hold in tension the political and the psychological, the concept of empirical fabulation enables me to trace that tension as it works itself out in Tehlirian’s testimony.

Critical fabulation, as enacted by Saidiya Hartman has the historian, the author, or the analyst as the key actor who does the fabulating: In Wayward Lives (Reference Hartman2019), she exercises her imagination for crafting narratives that—“To write new narratives and tell other stories entail a creative practice untethered to the rules of the historical guild, and characterized by the willingness to be directed by the assembly, the ensemble, the multitude, the chorus” (Hartman Reference Hartman2020). Specifically, Hartman conceives of ordinary young black women as “social visionaries” and “radical thinkers … who never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise,” and imagines their everyday bold acts of experimenting with freedom (Hartman Reference Hartman2019, xv). Here, I view Soghomon Tehlirian as the empirical fabulist, as a historical actor and survivor of the genocide. I track the imaginative leaps he makes and the blanks he fills in, thereby recognizing in him the author who is keenly aware that “language and narrative and plot are entangled in the mechanisms of power” (Hartman quoted in Okeowo Reference Okeowo2020). In my reading of his memoir, I have been emboldened by Hartman’s explication of critical fabulation as close narration. But while I walk in Tehlirian’s footsteps as he finds his way back to his village to find his childhood destroyed, as he is first visited by his mother’s ghost, and as he decides to hunt down Talat Paşa, I am careful to retain the distinction between the interpretation of the analyst and the fabulation of the protagonist.

While it never came to light in the trial, in his harrowing memoir Tehlirian reveals that, long before their encounter in Berlin, he was intent on killing Talat, the hresh (the monster) or the vishap (the dragon), as he alternately refers to him. It also becomes clear that Soghomon did not witness the murders of his family. He was not even in Erzincan at the time. Soghomon had left his town in his teens to join his father in Serbia, who had immigrated there for work. On the eve of World War I, Soghomon would be on the move once again: this time he would flee, defying his father, to join fellow Ottoman Armenians who volunteered for the Russian forces.Footnote ¹⁶ Inducted as a gamavor (volunteer) in an Armenian battalion led by General Antranig, Soghomon trained in Tiblisi, Georgia waiting for deployment to fight the Ottoman army.Footnote ¹⁷

In his memoir, Soghomon is unabashed and explicit about the fact that he started to entertain the idea of hunting down Talat from the early days of the genocide, when he first began to realize the horrific extent of the killings and the likelihood that his family, too, had perished. Upon his arrival in the village and the first dream visitation by his mother, his idea solidified into resolution. It was in mid-July, Soghomon Tehlirian tells the reader, when the Russian troops occupied Erzincan, that he was first able to make his way back. In the square he saw children playing in the yard of the Central School, which had been converted into an orphanage for the children whose parents had been deported or murdered. His own house had been transformed into a makeshift military abode.

When Soghomon came to himself, he tells us, it was still dark. He stepped out of the garden, still trembling: “My head was burning like a furnace, my entire body was shaking. I got up and I covered my body with my overcoat, but it did not help. My body was quivering with cold” (ibid.: 46). Passing by the Tarikian family house, he discerned a figure, his brother Misak, who would turn out to be his only remaining sibling. They embraced, and Misak told him that he, too, had just made his way back from Serbia via Batum to search for the family. Noting how sickly his brother looked, Misak ushered Soghomon to the house of the Tarikian who had stayed alive by converting to Islam, a last resort for some Armenians in some locations during early stages of the genocide.Footnote ¹⁸ As they recounted the massacres they had witnessed, Mrs. Tarikian took a look at Soghomon and insisted he should rest.

When Soghomon looked out from the window, which had a view of their own garden, his body began to tremble anew. “I saw myself as a pathetic, useless, worthless creature. Revulsion was what I felt towards myself. I was not anything like those who had a reason for and a desire to live…. My imagination was still not able to grasp how, the population of twenty thousand Armenians in this cheerful town were reduced to a handful of families” (ibid.: 46). He conjured the image of Talat’s “disgusting” countenance—the “monster”; the “dragon.” Now Soghomon wanted Talat’s blood to flow. “Could I really believe that justice would one day prevail?” (ibid.). At this point in his memoir, he abruptly transitions into a strange narrative mode, with no signposting as to whether he is describing a nightmare, waking dream, or reminiscence:

In describing his fainting spell in the garden, Tehlirian had not used the word for fainting but simply depicted the act of falling to the ground. In this instance, too, he used neither of the Armenian words for dream—yeraz or tsnork—to describe his first encounter with the spectral.Footnote ¹⁹ The sequence opens with the ambiguous, “As if….” The power of Shakespeare’s rendition of the spectral, Greenblatt has pointed out, is that Shakespeare comes down on neither side of sheer fantasy or of transparent reality. He teeters on those edges between “hallucination and spiritual reality, between fantasy and fact,” and, “where psychic disturbance and objective truth meet” (2013: 193).

If the spectral figures in the universe of Soghomon’s memoir echo those stories that informed the Elizabethan playwright of murdered spirits returning to haunt their murderers, Soghomon’s visions recall most obviously King Hamlet, the quintessential Shakespearean ghost commissioning retribution and the protagonist struggling with the assigned mission. But there is also a difference that is critical to the genocidal context. While King Hamlet commissions revenge from his very first appearance, Soghomon’s mother initially asks him not to avenge them, but to join them. His brother, too, accuses him not of failing to seek retribution but for not lying there with them. The dead, in the immediate aftermath of genocidal violence, beckon the living not to avenge them but to die with them. (Perhaps it is also not arbitrary that, unlike Hamlet’s father, who even if deathly pale always appears as an intact body, Soghomon first encounters his mother as well as his brother as beheaded apparitions.) The initial reproach and the concomitant guilt, therefore, are not (yet) about revenge. They are about the guilt of survival itself, of having survived a massacre that was intended to include him. Recall here Soghomon’s estimation of himself: as a pathetic, useless, worthless, creature. He feels no desire to live, unless there is a purpose he can hold on to.

It is only in later apparitions, the ones that Tehlirian also recounted in court, that his mother starts calling for revenge. Hence the progression in the visions, from the ghost’s invitation to join the dead to its call for revenge and redemption. It is as if the only way that Soghomon can justify refusing the invitation to join the ranks of the dead is by transitioning to an avenger. As the mother’s ghost transforms into an avenger and transforms Soghomon in the process, she is no longer headless but appears to him whole. Moreover, she increasingly speaks in a tongue similar to King Hamlet’s, in which the condition of filial loyalty becomes revenge. She scolds, “You saw Talat and you did not avenge your mother’s, father’s, brother’s, and sister’s murders?… You are no longer my son” (Tʻēhlirean Reference Tʻēhlirean2006: 137).Footnote ²⁰ Soghomon’s guilt increasingly takes on the shape of Hamlet’s: guilt not just of being alive but of taking no action in the face of the injustice and violence suffered by one’s kin.Footnote ²¹

A crucial difference remains, however, between the Hamlet who is haunted to avenge the murder of his father and Soghomon haunted to avenge the murder of his entire family and community. Hamlet will occasionally be thrown into tortured indecision between action or inaction: “O cursed spite/that ever I was born to set it right.” Soghomon never wavers, or at least never confesses to any such hesitation in his memoir. He never doubts the morality of the act to kill the hresh who had given the orders to wipe out his family, along with virtually the entire Armenian population in Anatolia. Only when he is forced to do things that take him off his course for revenge—from having to take lessons in German to being dragged to go dancing by his fellow mates—does he experience the deepest anguish.

It is, of course, hard to know for certain if the memoir glosses over any wavering Tehlirian might have actually experienced, as his lawyers in court strategically claimed that he had. Hesitation or doubt would not have been befitting of a man with a cause, one who must already have had some intuition that his account would be read by future generations of Armenians. This is why I read the memoir, too, as an act of empirical fabulation, and do not assume it to be a transparent window into Tehlirian’s soul. And yet, it is the choices he makes in the memoir which contradict the account he gave to the jury that ultimately provide a fuller portrait of Soghomon Tehlirian, one that unsettles designations of him as a “desperate hitman” simply in the service of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Furthermore, the discrepancies between the court testimony and the memoir enable me to further explore the calibration between the empirical and the fabulated, toward an understanding of the nature of “the lie” in a context and landscape engineered to wipe out the truth of genocide.

I thus turn to the final key discrepancy between the court testimony and the memoir: the assassination of Talat was not Tehlirian’s first killing.

Lying to Tell the Truth

The day after his arrival in Istanbul in December 1918, Soghomon recounts in the memoir, he went to the office of the newspaper Jagadamard to place a listing for missing family members. “Who are you searching for,” the clerk behind the desk asked him. From the tone of his voice, it became instantly clear to Soghomon that the search for relatives had become ordinary, a matter of meaningless paperwork. Still, he told the clerk, “My mother, my brother, the wives of my two brothers and their children.” “Impossible to find them all,” the clerk responded, “and even if you were to find a single one of them, that would be extraordinary” (2006: 112).

At the office, he met Yeranuhi Tanielian, a high school teacher, who told him that most of the slaughterers (chartarar) had fled Istanbul. And as they walk through the streets of Galata, a central hub also for non-Muslim citizens, Ms. Tanielian suddenly paused: “This is the residence of Talat’s Armenian conspirator…. Harutyun Mgerdichian the informant, who became rich on the blood of our community’s most brilliant, bought a house, now enjoying his life! Istanbul’s Armenian intelligentsia was arrested and later killed based on the list Mgerdichian compiled for Talat” (ibid.: 115).

The “list” in question is the notorious list of more than 250 leaders of the Armenian community whose arrests in the middle of the night on 24 April 1915 have come to be viewed as the decapitation strike that marks the beginning of the genocide of 1915. Soghomon, though not yet privy to the full significance of “the list,” froze in his tracks, his thoughts fixated on the “new monster” (nor hresh): Harutyun, the rat: “Had it not become inevitable to begin my mission of vengeance (vrezh) with him, the mission that had become the reason of my existence for a while now?” (ibid.: 116).

Any lingering doubt in his mind as to the veracity of Ms. Tanielian’s account was laid to rest after his brief visit for a coffee with her and her mother. As he took leave, Ms. Tanielian fetched an album book from her desk. “Would you be so kind as to write a few lines here,” she asks. Soghomon inscribed the following lines:

Soghomon went on to inquire after other luminaries of Armenian literature, Siamanto and Rupen Zartaryan, and she responded: “He too, he too! All of them” (ibid.: 116).

Soghomon’s decision was clinched. After a few days of keeping watch, he stood gazing at the Mgerdichian residence with a direct view of a dinner table where a group of guests were gathered. “The informant had raised a glass and was delivering a speech” (ibid.: 126). Soghomon took aim at his head, where he knew he was certain to kill, but at the last minute, he could not resist the inner voice that urged him to aim for the heart. The windows came crashing down and he ran.

Soghomon Tehlirian was never found out or charged for the killing, but news spread among the Armenian resistance, which rendered him an ideal candidate for Operation Nemesis, a special mission of the Tashnagtsutyun, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF). Not revealed in the Berlin trial, then, was the fact that ARF had selected Tehlirian to kill Talat, designated as “Number One” on their assassination list, which included one hundred other influential Young Turks. The ARF, operating out of Watertown, Massachusetts, obtained Tehlirian’s visa so he could travel to Europe, paid for his expenses in Berlin, and made sure that he would be represented by the top lawyers in Germany. Marian MacCurdy (Reference MacCurdy2015), based on the hidden archives of her grandfather discovered in their family home in Syracuse after his death, has documented Tehlirian’s correspondence with other members of the operative in the United States and in Europe. It provides ample evidence of the care with which his assignment was planned and executed by a core group within the party.

It is easy to see how some have seized upon these facts to argue that Tehlirian’s testimony in Berlin was merely a series of lies and that he was simply an assassin carrying out a task assigned to him by a political organization. While this position is often taken in the service of genocide denial, for others it stems from an inadequate understanding of Tehlirian’s life because of a failure to engage with the memoir as an equally important archive. My claim is not that the memoir reveals “the real Soghomon Tehlirian,” but it certainly complicates and deepens our insight into him as the historical actor and haunted son that he was.

Dismissing Tehlirian’s testimony or his memoir as either sheer falsehood or conniving self-presentation in the service of a political agenda ultimately ignores the nature of personal testimony and the possibilities of representation in cases of genocidal violence and denial.

That the line between truth and fiction here was much more complicated is eloquently described by Eric Bogosian (Reference Bogosian2017), who demonstrates that Tehlirian used the trial to reveal the full extent of the violence of 1915 by “offer[ing] mere fragments of truth” (ibid.: 86) and “walking a tightrope as he balanced truth and fiction” (ibid.: 88).

It might not have been exclusively his personal story, but every detail Tehlirian testified to at the trial was drawn from the collective history of genocide. A variation of every sentence he uttered has been replicated by other survivors of the Armenian genocide, spoken in hushed voices behind closed family doors, or silently transmitted across generations.Footnote ²² Moreover, the personal account was already, inextricably political. “It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth,” Foucault writes, “for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth…. One ‘fictions’ history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth” (Reference Foucault and Gordon1980: 193). This was how Tehlirian and the Tashnak party must have seen their task: a testimony fabricated on the basis of the historical truth of collective murders perpetrated against Armenians, thereby a testimony that functioned as a politics of genocide recognition, which, while not yet in existence, would inspire Lemkin to coin the term a few decades later.

Pushing Foucault’s proposition to its extreme, would anyone on that stand who exposed the truths of genocide qualify as an empirical fabulist? Someone, for example, who did not lose family members or witness the condition of the orphaned children? At an even further remove, someone not Armenian but committed to the cause of genocide recognition? While I see the political possibilities in this line of argumentation, for the designation of empirical fabulist I propose here, it does matter that Tehlirian was a first-hand witness to genocide; that he saw the mutilated corpses of murdered villagers as he and his battalion fought the Ottoman army across the Russian border; that his mother, brother, and brothers’ wives were massacred; and that when he finally reached his village he witnessed that virtually no Armenians were left.Footnote ²³ In my oxymoronic juxtaposition of the empirical with fabulation, I retain, therefore, the relevance of the proximity of the testimony to personal experience and involvement.Footnote ²⁴

My concern with the limits of fabulation and the “threshold of evidence” (Gordon-Reed Reference Gordon-Reed2020) constitutes the second divergence from my reading of Tehlirian as empirical fabulist and Hartman’s deployment of critical fabulation. While Hartman refuses the charge that what she is doing is historical fiction, she also deliberately commits to “imagining another kind existence” for the people she writes about. Hers is an intentional eschewal of the boundary between what Hartman imagines Black life was like in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century and what Black life could have been. She is explicit that blurring the line between what was and what could have been is part of her ethical and political stance in a historical and epistemological context that will not allow Blacks full personhood. According to historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s measured critique of Hartman, however, it is also the case that Hartman does not consider whether there might be a point at which the critical fabulator might be going too far. This is what Gordon-Reed (ibid.) refers to as the “threshold of evidence,” which, if entirely jettisoned, risks “projecting progressive visions and practices of freedom onto women who were in fact driven by brute necessity and poverty” as the critical fabulist reimagines their lives.

As the third-order interpreter of Tehlirian’s second-order rendition of his experiences, I remain wedded to calibrating the threshold of evidence. So does Tehlirian, I argue, treading the delicate line between the Hartmanian leap to critical fabulation and holding onto the concern with the “more traditional, social-historical questions of who did what, where, when, and why” (Kazanjian Reference Kazanjian2016: 135). If contemporary indigenous hyperrealist art forms “fake it with the truth,” (Biddle and Lea Reference Biddle and Lea2018), because this was seen as the most powerful way to expose the violence of settler colonialism, Tehlirian similarly calibrates how “artifice enables reality effects” Reference Tʻēhlirean2006: 6).Footnote ²⁵ The empirical fabulist offers a new political and ethical mode of truth-telling, of making truthful statements about historical events and experiences that cannot be articulated otherwise.Footnote ²⁶

It should be clear by now that I am wary of reading Tehlirian’s testimony and memoir solely in strategic terms. Joining those who ponder whether it is possible to write about the Holocaust, philosopher Marc Nichanian (Reference Nichanian2002) has insisted on the impossibility of being a witness to a catastrophic event like the Armenian genocide. Any telling that aims at veracity is bound to fall short of the violence of the actual experience. Rather than striving to represent genocidal violence through archival facts or witness testimony, Nichanian beckons us to turn to art and literature. As genres that do not profess empirical veracity and embrace their constructed nature, only the arts and literature can broach even if never quite capture genocidal violence. If Adorno declared that no poetry was possible after Auschwitz, Nichanian argues that there can only be poetry after the Medz Yeghern (the Great Catastrophe). On Nichanian’s account, one may suggest that Tehlirian had no choice but to fabulate. We can go full circle back to his memorable utterance in court: “I can’t remember that day anymore.… I don’t want to keep on being reminded of that day. I’d rather die right now than continue describing that black day” (Yeghiayan Reference Yeghiayan2006: 9). What from a purely empirical point of view might appear as testimonial evasion emerges as the (un)tellable truth about the collective experience of genocide that exceeds the limits of the genre of personal or legal testimony. Hence the ghostly ontology I have presented, which is less about the empirical reality of the ghost and more about the conditions of possibility, or perhaps necessity, for such hauntings.