A commemoration evening dedicated to the Armenian Genocide Centennial will take place Thursday in Oberhausen, Germany. 

At the event, pieces from world literature and music compositions will be performed, and young photographer Andy Spyra’s photography exhibition entitled “Searching for Traces between Ararat and Lake Van” will be displayed, reported Der Westen daily of Germany. 

Oberhausen Theatre Ensemble performer Hartmut Stanke stressed that calling the events that occurred one hundred years ago as genocide is still banned in Turkey.  

In this connection, Stanke brought the example of France, where a fine is set for denial of the first genocide of the 20th century.

At the evening, Hartmut Stanke will read passages from the novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, by Austrian-Bohemian writer and humanist Franz Werfel.

This novel is based on true events that took place in 1915, during the second year of World War I and at the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. The novel focuses on the self-defense by a small community of Armenians living near Musa Dagh, a mountain in Hatay Province in the then Ottoman Empire—now part of southern Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast—as well the events in Istanbul and provincial capitals, where the Young Turk government orchestrated the deportations, concentration camps, and massacres of the empire’s Armenian citizens.