Book on Berlin Philharmoic's Nazi Ties

Book tells of Philharmonic's Nazi ties

By DAVID McHUGH, Associated Press Writer 58 minutes ago

The Berlin Philharmonic became a privileged servant of Nazi propaganda after Adolf Hitler's 1933 takeover, striking a deal with the new regime that won it financial security and perks such as fine instruments and draft exemptions for the musicians.

That's according to a new book recounting how the orchestra — then and now considered one of the world's best — lent its gloss to the Nazis. The arrangement saw the orchestra touring abroad as an example of supposed German cultural superiority and serenading Hitler on his birthday.

In "Das Reichsorchester," or "The Reich's Orchestra," Berlin-based Canadian historian Misha Aster writes that the relationship between the Nazis and the orchestra was a complex one in which each side exploited the other — although Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels held the upper hand over the orchestra and its star conductor, Wilhelm Fuertwaengler.

The Philharmonic's predicament began with its financial woes in the depressed German economy of the 1920s and 1930s, Aster says.

As a private company owned by its musicians, the fiercely independent, democratic-minded orchestra was reduced to begging for government subsidies even before the Nazi takeover in January 1933. Then, the orchestra and Fuertwaengler suddenly found an eager partner in Goebbels, who saw music as a political tool. The Nazi government simply bought out the musicians' shares and turned them into civil servants, guaranteeing steady and generous government support.

The Berlin Philharmonic had been unwilling to cut musicians' salaries or reduce its size, so Nazi financing meant it could continue to hire topflight musicians and play works demanding a large orchestra, thus preserving its elite role at the top of the German musical world.

"The pact with the Nazi regime resulted from the terrible financial situation of the orchestra since the middle of the 1920s, a certain feeling of superiority on the part of the orchestra collective and Goebbel's vision of cultural propaganda," Aster writes.

There was a price to be paid. Services to the regime included blocking out every April 18-21 for celebrations surrounding Hitler's birthday.

The musicians also played for Hitler Youth gatherings and joined forces with the Nazi cultural organization Strength Through Joy, giving concerts in sports halls to introduce classics to the masses, with swastikas prominently on display.

From his side, Fuertwaengler used his ties to Goebbels — who was eager to keep the temperamental conductor in Germany — to defend the orchestra's four Jewish musicians after the Nazi takeover. He rebuffed demands from the few Nazi party members in the orchestra ranks to fire the Jews.

But the four Jews, including concertmaster, or lead violinist, Szymon Goldberg, all fled Germany by the beginning of the 1935-36 season amid the intense anti-Semitism of Nazi rule. One, cellist Nicolai Graudan, left after getting an insulting contract renewal offer that omitted his premium as a soloist and section leader. He was apparently unprotected after Fuertwaengler temporarily left the orchestra in 1934 in a dispute with authorities over what works he could perform.

The Philharmonic's privileges included a rare draft exemption that held even until the end of World War II, when the collapsing regime sent children to die fighting approaching Soviet forces — but kept the orchestra playing. It performed Bruckner, Wagner and Beethoven — all Nazi favorites — at a private concert for armaments chief Albert Speer on April 11, 1945, less than a month before the war ended.

The players were also offered fine old string instruments. Hitler had complained that musicians in Vienna all seemed to have old violins and cellos — which generally sound better than new ones — while only a few of the Berliners had them.

The origins of the instruments were kept unclear, but Aster assumes some were purchased while others were probably stolen. Concertmaster Erich Roehn received a 1750 violin made by Italian master Pietro Guarnieri, while another violinist got a valuable Guadagnini.

Fuertwaengler and the musicians were far from alone. Some non-Jewish artists, such as conductors Fritz Busch and Arturo Toscanini, shunned the Nazis, but countless other musicians and famed conductors such as Karl Boehm and Herbert von Karajan kept working under Nazi rule.

The book is being welcomed by the orchestra, which will put on a historical exhibit about its role in the Nazi years starting Saturday in the lobby of its Berlin concert hall in conjunction with publication. Today, people of 19 different nationalities play with the Berlin Philharmonic, including an Israeli concertmaster, Guy Braunstein, and a British conductor, Sir Simon Rattle.

Aster, whose sources included state, orchestra and private archives, said he received financial support during his research from the Friends of the Berlin Philharmonic, the orchestra's donor organization, but that he had a contract for the book on his own with the publisher, Siedler, part of Random House.

"Neither the orchestra nor the foundation had any control over the contents," he said.

The Philharmonic's Nazi ties were not secret and parts of its story have been told in histories of Nazi cultural policy. Much historical writing, however, focused on Fuertwaengler, while Aster emphasizes the orchestra as an institution, using private archives of former musicians.

Aster said that one reason a general history of the orchestra's experience is being written only now, more than 60 years after the end of the regime, is that questions about the Nazi era were not welcome at the Philharmonic during the 1955-1989 reign of conductor Karajan, a former Nazi Party member.

The Berlin orchestra's compromises with the Nazis reflected those of the larger German society, Aster told The Associated Press.

"The even sadder truth is, it was symptomatic of what became of Germany and German society as a whole — how easy it was to be seduced," he said. "The moral compromises that started it seemed to be small prices to pay."

Book Review: When Great Art Meets Great Evil

Lebrecht Music Library, London--Wilhelm Furtwängler, at the end of a concert in 1939, reaching out to shake hands with Hitler rather than responding with the “Heil Hitler!” salute.

NYT
July 29, 2007
Music
When Great Art Meets Great Evil

FOR those who find inspiration and edification in great art, it is always painful to be reminded that artists are not necessarily admirable as people and that art is powerless in the face of great evil. That truth was baldly evident in Nazi Germany and in the way the regime used and abused music and musicians, to say nothing of the way it used and abused human beings of all kinds.

Two new novels touch on these issues in very different ways. In “The Savior” (Simon & Schuster), Eugene Drucker, a violinist in the Emerson String Quartet, creates Gottfried Keller, a violinist made to perform for suffering and often unruly patients in army infirmaries and for doomed inmates in a concentration camp. In “Variations on the Beast” (Dragon Press), Henry Grinberg, a psychoanalyst, posits Hermann Kapp-Dortmunder, a powerful maestro, as a fictional rival of Wilhelm Furtwängler (whose qualms about working under the regime he does not share) and Herbert von Karajan (whose vaulting ambition he does).

Mr. Drucker and Mr. Grinberg recently discussed their books and the issues they raise with James R. Oestreich. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.

OESTREICH Gene, give us a sense of what your book is about, how you came to this.

DRUCKER It’s a story that first came to me when I was preparing for the Queen Elisabeth competition in Belgium about 30 years ago. I played a lot of concerts to prepare myself for any kinds of distractions that might occur during the first two rounds of the competition, in which I knew that the jury was going to be seated directly in front of the stage. I knew that they might be writing comments at a certain point, and I felt that I needed to arm myself with as much experience as possible.

So I arranged a number of concerts in churches and private homes. And I enrolled in an organization called Hospital Audiences, which sent young performers out to hospitals, drug rehabilitation wards, veterans’ hospitals, alcoholics’ wards. And I got experience playing for people from all different strata socioeconomically, a lot of different ethnic backgrounds. And I had some distracting experiences while I was doing that.

In an alcoholics’ ward in the Bronx, when I was unable to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” on request, which is what they seemed to think a violinist should be able to do, they were really ticked off at me. And one woman turned her chair around and faced the wall the whole time I was playing. I could just feel a lot of bad will coming from some of the people as I was playing. I don’t mean to characterize all of the hospital performances like that. Some of the people were very attentive.

So I guess all of these observations were in the back of my mind as I went through the competition. I made it to the finals, and I was preparing for my New York debut recital later that year.

But I knew that I wanted to write something. I thought there was some material here about the relationship between a performer and his audiences. And perhaps it would be interesting to push it to the most extreme possible circumstances to see what effect that would have on the performer, and if music would have a different effect from usual on audiences in extreme situations as well. And somehow the idea of basing a story in Nazi Germany, in which a great deal of the action would take place in a concentration camp, came into my mind.

So I imagined the encounter between the violinist and his audience as a series of performances as part of an experiment. I never intended this to be a completely realistic story. The amount of change that occurs within three or four days in the camp, both in the violinist and in the inmates, is perhaps more metaphorical than intended to be accepted as something that could really happen in such a short span of time.

OESTREICH Your father’s experiences are also reflected.

DRUCKER Absolutely. But those I added somewhat later, as I was trying to flesh out the idea and add some subplots, which involve flashbacks to the period from 1933 to ’35. My father told me a great deal about his experiences as a Jew in Germany. When he graduated from the Hochschule in Cologne, he was supposed to play the Brahms Violin Concerto with the school orchestra. Then one day, after a Nazi administrative director had been appointed, he found his name crossed off the program posted on the bulletin board and went and told his teacher, Bram Eldering, one of the most revered violin teachers in Germany.

Eldering went with my father to the director’s office and said, “If Drucker can’t play the Brahms concerto, I will resign.” And it was early enough in the Third Reich that that kind of thing was not dangerous to do. So they made a compromise: My father was allowed to play the first movement of the concerto. He came out onstage and saw the first three rows of the audience lined with brownshirts. So I can imagine that the vibes he was getting from the audience were a lot more negative than the ones I was getting when I couldn’t play “Flight of the Bumblebee” in the alcoholics’ ward.

OESTREICH I started with Gene because Henry was saying the other day that he intended to write much the same kind of novel, but it went in a different direction once he started writing. Gene’s antihero is just somewhat uncomprehending, it seems to me.

DRUCKER Well, he tends to be naïve. But I tried hard not to make him too naïve, you know. I needed him to be believable.

OESTREICH But Henry’s antihero is grasping and cynical and altogether unpleasant.

GRINBERG He’s altogether unpleasant. But in a similarly — I shouldn’t say similarly, but in a strikingly naïve way. What characterizes him is that he’s an arrant opportunist. And he takes advantage, not too much pleasure, in whatever comes his way. And what doesn’t destroy him permits him to survive.

Can I tell a little about myself?

I was born in London of Eastern European Jewish parents in 1930 and spent the war years there, which did much to shape me. Thank God the British were never occupied by the Germans. But they were only 21 miles away across the channel. And it was hairy.

So I formed an absorption with the war, the events of the war. I didn’t know much about it while it was going on, but I’ve permitted myself to be consumed by histories, biographies, accounts, memoirs and movies of all kinds.

And this has existed on an equal plane with my passion for music, which is also all-consuming. My mother thought I had a good singing voice when I was a small child. And she thought if I only learned to play the piano, I could make myself a good living playing in cabarets. I don’t know why this idea seized her, but I’ve always been absorbed by music. So I was driven by these dual passions: music and the war.

And it soon occurred to me — when I was big, when I was able to sort my thoughts out — that, my God, a lot of the famous, the notable, the moving, the magnificent composers in the 18th and 19th centuries and earlier were Germans. And I tried to understand, how did such a nation turn out to be so bestial and cruel, so indifferent to the suffering of others? And I have no explanation for it.

As a practicing psychoanalyst, I can see individual expressions of rage and their causes and their so-called justifications. But for a whole nation to be consumed, to be seduced by an overwhelming idea — well, there are rationalizations, I guess, but not explanations. There’s no forgiveness for this. And I tried to put together a story of a person who was a participant and a causer of these kinds of things. At first I had it in mind to write a book something like Gene’s, from the point of view of a horrified observer. But I thought that it had been done. I’d read everything. What more could be said?

So I sort of poured my feelings of contempt and rage into the character I was devising. And I have to admit, after having been psychoanalyzed myself in preparation for the training, that something of Hermann Kapp-Dortmunder exists in me. I shudder to think that this may be so, but I have to accept the possibility. Murderous thoughts may have occurred to me, but, thank God, I’ve never killed anyone. Yet. So I framed a story from his young childhood — he is a winning child, a very attractive child — through his progressive deterioration as a contemptible character become more and more despicable.

OESTREICH Both of you, I’m sure, have thought of the larger issues involved in this. It’s almost a cliché to say that great art can’t coexist with cruelty and inhumanity. But, of course, it does. What do you make of those larger issues?

DRUCKER Great art is no protection against cruelty, bestiality. I think that both of our books show that. I do think there’s some possibility, if not for redemption, at least for some kind of solace in great art.

I’m thinking of Adorno’s famous phrase that after Auschwitz there could be no poetry. But the fact is that of course the world picks itself up — never fully recovering from the wounds, but the world picks itself up and goes on with its business in every sense of the word.

Maybe humanity saw in the Second World War, on a larger scale than ever before, the depths of depravity to which human nature could sink. And maybe it was more curious than ever that you could have people so involved with great art and willingly consenting to and ordering horrible mass executions to take place. But the fact is that art has continued. And if art could go forward, that means that people could draw some comfort from it.

And you could also say there’s a possibility for greater humanity through art than if you just let yourself be totally pulled down by the horrible things that have happened in the 20th century and that are now happening in various parts of the world. If you just let yourself get pulled down by it, then there’s even less hope for humanity.

GRINBERG One of the things that intrigues me is that art is devised by individual human beings. National policies or regional policies are products of organizations — governments, communities — for good or ill. And great artists themselves can be, as we say in psychoanalysis, compartmentalized: capable of the most magnificent instincts and thoughts and products, and at the same time capable of the most sordid conduct. So it’s a constant puzzle. And I draw from this no greater or more profound observation than that we’re all capable of it. What prevents us from doing the worst? Or what prevents us from doing our best? Or what doesn’t spur us on to do our best? Circumstance? National pride? Countless things. We all have to watch ourselves.

OESTREICH Is there any lasting effect on the music itself?

DRUCKER I think that classical music may have lost some of its status, position, in society for various reasons. And the main one, in my mind, is that popular culture has diverged, has gone much farther away from classical music, as far as I can tell, than it was 60 or 80 years ago. Whether that has anything to do with the Second World War, I’m not sure. I do know, from watching American movies from the 1940s and ’50s, that classical music was much more part of the general culture then than it is now. I can think of specific examples where people just let casual remarks drop, even if the movie’s not really about music, when you realize: “Oh, these people knew about Jascha Heifetz. They knew about Brahms’s Second Symphony.”

Usually nowadays when there’s a reference to classical music, I find it very stereotyped. It’s meant to almost caricature the way classical musicians might seem. And I don’t know if that has anything to do with what happened in the Second World War. I would tend to doubt it.

OESTREICH Are there any other thoughts on any of these issues?

GRINBERG I took great pains in trying to sketch out and to develop a character unable to form an independent conviction: political, social, moral. Because I don’t think the bulk of the German nation was psychopathic. But they, in the popular phrase, went along. And that’s a great bafflement to me: Why do people go along? And if I can refer to the current political situation, lots of people simply, to my mind, just go along for the sake of good old slogans, good old traditions and a blind belief that if we do it, it’s O.K.

Music of WWII victims finds new life

AP
Music of WWII victims finds new life

By ARIEL DAVID, Associated Press Writer 14 minutes ago

A waltz. A tango. A piece of jazz. But they weren't composed in Vienna, Buenos Aires or New Orleans. Scribbled on diaries, loose pages or even toilet paper, these are the notes left behind by people who lived and died in the prisons and concentration camps of World War II.

Italian researchers hope thousands of nearly forgotten works will find new life as they assemble a library of music composed or played in those dark places between 1933 and 1945.

"We are trying to right a great wrong: These musicians were hoping for a musical life for themselves, and they would have had it if their destiny had been different," said Italian musician Francesco Lotoro.

He has been collecting originals, copies and recordings of everything from operas composed in the depth of the Nazi death machine to jazz pieces written in Japanese POW camps in Asian jungles.

The library, set to open in September at Rome's Third University, will offer scholars a repertoire of 4,000 papers and 13,000 microfiches including music sheets, letters, drawings and photos.

For more than 15 years, working largely alone, Lotoro has been crisscrossing the globe, usually at his own expense, hunting down musical works from museums, archives and antique shops, as well as from survivors or their families.

Lotoro, a pianist, is also rearranging and recording many of the pieces to produce a collection of 32 CDs, five of which have already been published. Musicians and singers who live in or around his southern Italian town of Barletta, and who share his passion, often spend their Sundays working with him in the recording studio.

Experts who are aware of Lotoro's work say it's the first time such a vast effort has been made to assemble and revive in one place a musical treasure trove scattered around the world.

"I don't know of any institution gathering only musical documentation," said Bret Werb, the musicologist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. "It's an important project that will become an important resource for musicians globally."

In an interview, Lotoro said he is constantly discovering new works, "and this is not a good sign; it's a sign that history hasn't done its job."

Lotoro, 42, says his ancestors were Jews forced to convert to Christianity centuries ago. Attracted to Judaism in his teens, he converted in 2002.

He first looked into music written during the Holocaust on a 1991 trip to Prague — and quickly got a sense of the task ahead.

"I left for two weeks with a small bag hoping to bring back a dozen works, but in the end I had to buy a bigger suitcase to carry home hundreds of manuscripts and photocopies," he recalled.

Finding a long-sought piece is only the beginning, since it may well be fragmentary and written clandestinely or in haste, Lotoro said.

Among the key works he has labored on for the last decade are those of Rudolf Karel, a Czech composer arrested by the Nazis for taking part in the resistance in Prague.

Locked up in a military prison and plagued by dysentery, Karel used mostly toilet paper to compose a vast repertoire, including a five-act opera and a nonet, a composition for nine instruments.

The last of his music sheets found by Lotoro is an upbeat "Prisoners' March" dated four days before his death in March 1945.

Many of Lotoro's finds are works written in Theresienstadt, a Czech town used by the Nazis from 1941 as a ghetto and transit camp to which Jewish leaders and prominent artists were deported from all over Europe.

Theresienstadt — Terezin in Czech — was used by the Germans as a propaganda tool to hide their extermination plans from international organizations, and inmates were able to stage operas, concerts and cabaret shows with several orchestras, including one called the "Ghetto Swingers."

All the same, of the 140,000 Jews sent there, 33,000 died and nearly 90,000 were deported to death camps.

The Rome library will include works by Gypsies imprisoned by the Nazis; chorus songs by Dutch women interned by the Japanese in Indonesia, and the music of Edmund Lilly, a U.S. colonel from North Carolina who wrote songs and poems as he went through various Japanese camps from surrender in the Philippines in 1942 to liberation in Manchuria more than three years later.

Also in the library are the works of Berto Boccosi, an Italian captain who started writing an opera while held by the Allies in an Algerian camp. And Lotoro says he is looking into music written by German officers imprisoned in Soviet camps.

"Music is a universal language, so the music written by the German officer and by the Jewish prisoner have the same historical value," Lotoro said.

He said he hopes the library will give scholars greater understanding of "the explosion of creativity" that gave birth to a tango in Buchenwald or a waltz in the Italian camp of Alberobello.

"You can always feel the tragedy in the background, but in his creative effort a musician is capable of escaping reality," he said.

But the music could also contain the seed of defiance, as in the "March of Terezin," which was played after cabaret shows in Theresienstadt and begins with the opening notes of "Hatikva" — the future Israeli national anthem.

If nothing else, music was a way for prisoners to stay sane.

"Composing for an author is a question of mental survival," said David Meghnagi, a psychology professor at the Third University who is spearheading the creation of the library. "In this way he keeps his humanity intact and allows his mind to imagine a different future."

Simon Bikindi Trial Watch

I noted that Simon Bikindi's name popped up last month as a trial motion was published. The UN wheels of justice are turning with excruiciating slowness. Bikindi is a rare case in that he is a musician charged with crimes against humanity because of his role in the geniocide in Rwanda. As a reminder of his case, here's this from the BBC:

Saturday, 30 March, 2002, 11:22 GMT
Rwandan singer faces genocide trial

One of Rwanda's most popular singers has been transferred to the International Tribunal for Rwanda after losing a fight against his extradition.

Simon Bikindi is charged with six counts of genocide and crimes against humanity for having composed and performed songs demonising Tutsis, and inciting Hutus to kill them.

He was arrested nine months ago in the Netherlands, but battled against his transfer to the tribunal in Arusha in Tanzania. He is expected to appear before the court in the near future.

Mr Bikindi said in a recent interview that he was innocent, and that the songs he was writing in the 1990s merely reflected the mood of the time.

Music ban

He rose to fame singing of love and the beauty of the Rwandan countryside.

But in 1990, the tone of his songs changed.

His music has been banned in Rwanda since the end of the genocide.

A total of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu extremists between April and July 1994.

Slow procedures

The transfer of the singer comes as the war crimes tribunal is under huge pressure to speed up its procedures.

In the seven years since its creation, just nine people have been judged. Eight were convicted and given long sentences, and the ninth was acquitted.

The trial of one of the two others detained at the same time as Mr Bikindi, former Finance Minister Emmanuel Ndindabahizi, is already under way.

Mr Ndindabahizi, who was arrested in Belgium, has pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

An army chaplain, Emmanuel Rekundo, was also arrested in Switzerland in the same series of European arrests.

So far, more than 50 of those indicted by the Arusha tribunal for war crimes in Rwanda have been arrested.