ABSTRACT
Johannes Lepsius is a well-known person at least for those who are familiar with Franz Werfel’s novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh from 1933, where the Jewish-German writer labelled him the guarding angel of the Armenians, whose fate was his earthly task. This is a literary image, but more than a myth. He was an outstanding ethical thinker, a politically acting person with great obstinacy, someone who tried to match these and bring them together. Johannes Lepsius, in terms of moral courage, was an exceptional person among mostly state loyal Protestants in Wilhelmine, Germany, and was confronted with all these questions during his life, which he dedicated to the persecuted Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Still during the first months of the war, Lepsius subscribed to the illusion that the German-Turkish alliance would by necessity bring about a certain hegemonial Europeanization of Turkey at the hands of Germany – a “disciplined European government”, as he put it.
