Portraits of Hope

Elie Wiesel called the genocide of the Armenians during the First World War ‘the Holocaust before the Holocaust’. Around one and a half million Armenians - men, women and children – were slaughtered at the time of the First World War. This book outlines some of the historical facts and consequences of the massacres but sees it as its main objective to present the Armenians to the foreign reader, their history but also their lives and achievements in the present that finds most Armenians dispersed throughout the world. 3000 years after their appearance in history, 1700 years after adopting Christianity and almost 90 years after the greatest catastrophe in their history, these 50 ‘biographical sketches of intellectuals, artists, journalists, and others…produce a complicated kaleidoscope of a divided but lively people that is trying once again, to rediscover its ethnic coherence. Armenian civilization does not consist solely of stories about a far-off past, but also of traditions and a national conscience suggestive of a future that will transcend the present.’ [from the Preface]

Huberta v. Voss worked for many years as a political correspondent for various German dailies, before becoming spokesperson of the Speaker of the Bundestag. During the diplomatic assignment of her husband to Beirut and Nicosia, she edited and translated amongst others the Lebanese poet Nadia Tuéni from French into German. She has earned a M.A. in Political Science, Modern History and French Philology. She has three children and now lives as a freelance journalist and author in Berlin.