Holocaust and the Nazi Era

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      ‘Harmony,’ a Manilow Musical Set Under Nazis, Is Broadway-Bound

      by

      The show about the Comedian Harmonists, a real-life sextet that ran afoul of the Nazi regime, was first staged in 1997.“Harmony,” a musical about a German singing group upended by the rise of Nazism, will finally open on Broadway this fall with songs by Barry Manilow and his longtime collaborator, Bruce Sussman.The show, which Manilow and Sussman have been developing for more than 25 years, tells the true story of a sextet that ran afoul of the Nazi regime because the group featured both Jewish and non-Jewish members. The ensemble was called the Comedian Harmonists.“They represent everything I love — they’re a combination of The Manhattan Transfer and the Marx Brothers, with complicated harmonies — and funny as hell,” said Manilow, who wrote the show’s music. “When we dug into it, it just killed me: Why don’t we know about them?”Sussman, who wrote the book and lyrics, said the show was “about the quest for harmony in what turned out to be the most discordant chapter in human history.”Musicals often take a long time to reach Broadway, but “Harmony” has had a particularly protracted journey. The show was first staged in 1997, at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, and since then has had productions, with varying creative teams and casts: in 2013 at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, in 2014 at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, and last year at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York. There have been previous efforts to bring the show to Broadway, including a planned 2004 production that fell apart over a lack of funds.“We’re not letting go of this,” Manilow said. “We knew we had something that was special, even though we kept hitting brick walls.”The show is arriving at a time when antisemitism has become, once again, a growing concern in the United States and beyond; the issue is currently explored on Broadway in the play “Leopoldstadt” and the musical “Parade.” “It is sadly more resonant,” Sussman said, “with the rise of not only antisemitism but of autocrats around the world.”The Comedian Harmonists have been explored by other storytellers in the past: There was a 1997 movie, “The Harmonists,” and an unsuccessful 1999 musical, “Band in Berlin.” This latest musical is based in part on a historical archive compiled by Peter Czada.The Broadway production will be directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, who won a Tony Award for choreographing “After Midnight,” and who also helmed last year’s “Harmony” production with the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The Broadway cast has not yet been announced.The production is scheduled to start previews on Oct. 18 and to open on Nov. 13 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. The lead producers are Ken Davenport, Sandi Moran and Garry Kief. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ Tells of World War II Rescues

      by

      A Netflix series dramatizes the efforts of Varian Fry, an American who helped save some 2,000 people from the Nazis without his government’s support.When Anna Winger, the co-creator of the new Netflix series “Transatlantic,” relocated to the vibrant French port city of Marseille last year, she found a dilapidated villa awaiting her. The “relic,” as she called it, was ideal for her purpose: the recreation of the Villa Air-Bel where, early in World War II, a dapper American named Varian Fry oversaw an extraordinary rescue operation for artists and writers, most of them Jews, hounded by the Nazis and the Vichy government of occupied France.Arriving in Marseille in mid-August, 1940, determined to help those in danger after witnessing the abuse of Jews in Berlin in 1935, Fry had to battle not only the French authorities and Nazi ideology, but also his own risk-averse United States Consulate in Marseille.Improvising at a time when the United States had not yet entered the war, Fry, a rebel in a suit, navigated a narrow path until his forced departure in late August 1941. He was determined to secure safe passage and overseas visas for the thousands of “foreign undesirables” who soon came knocking on his door.Among the some 2,000 people he rescued were the artist Max Ernst, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the German novelist Heinrich Mann.In his book “Assignment: Rescue,” written after the war, Fry wrote of Nazism that “I could not remain idle as long as I had any chance at all of saving even a few of its intended victims.”For many years, Winger had been obsessed with the story of “this man alone doing something very brave,” she said in an interview. In 2018, she started working on the project, and in 2020, she optioned Julie Orringer’s novel “The Flight Portfolio,” which became the basis for the fictionalized events in the series.Winger, who created the shows “Unorthodox” and “Deutschland 83,” lives in Berlin, where “as a Jew you think of these stories all the time,” she said. Her parents, both anthropologists, were Harvard professors and “a lot of people in the generation above them were refugees from Europe.” For her, “the impact of the emigration made possible by Fry is immeasurable in its influence on midcentury American thought.”Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022; war broke out in Europe just a few days later. With millions of refugees eventually pouring out of Ukraine, the moral dilemmas of conflict that the series explores felt particularly pertinent. “For all of us, it was top of mind and seeped into our daily lives in Marseille,” Winger said. She would go home to a Berlin dealing with a vast influx of refugees.The show captures not only the life-or-death seriousness of Fry’s mission to save refugees of another war, but also something of the louche, living-on-the-edge drama of a city that has always been a crossroads, and in 1940, unlike the northern half of France, was not directly occupied by German troops.Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022, and war broke out in Europe not long after.Anika Molbar/NetflixThe Marseille that Fry and his motley team of driven young anti-Fascists encountered had something of the freewheeling intrigue captured in “Casablanca,” another story of people suspended by war in a foreign place, aching in limbo for love and visas. Inevitably, money and sex — the currency of clandestine escape — have their place in “Transatlantic.”“We try to be true to the history but also make fun by working with it in a heightened way,” Winger said. The degree of fictionalization in the series has already caused controversy; Sheila Isenberg, the author of a book on Fry, called the show a “travesty.”Much of this pushback has been focused on the decision to depict Fry having a gay relationship. In 2019, James D. Fry, his son, wrote a letter to The New York Times stating that “My father was indeed a closeted homosexual.” He was responding to a New York Times review by Cynthia Ozick of the Orringer novel that said of Fry, “there is no evidence of homosexuality,” contrary to the novel’s portrayal of him.“We consider the letter from his son, James Fry, to The New York Times to be the last word on the subject,” Winger said via email.In the show, Fry, played by Cory Michael Smith, works closely with Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs), an American heiress who brings her money, energy and connections to the mission, as well as with Albert O. Hirschman (Lucas Englander), a German Jewish intellectual who would become a distinguished American economist.Their activities meet the stern disapproval of the American consul general in Marseille, Hugh S. Fullerton (renamed Graham Patterson in the show), who is played by Corey Stoll. Fullerton, hewing to the then-neutral State Department line, wants to keep the United States out of the war. His vice consul, Hiram Bingham IV (Luke Thompson), thinks otherwise, however, and he quietly helps Fry with travel documents, some of them fraudulent.The interactions between these characters, their relationships and ruses, their hopes and hypocrisies, form the narrative backbone to “Transatlantic.”Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs) and Graham Patterson (Corey Stoll) have a dalliance on the show, even as he is resistant to the team’s rescue efforts.Anika Molbar/NetflixOne night last spring, Winger shot scenes featuring Jacobs and Stoll in the recreated Villa Air-Bel, on the outskirts of the city. The consul, a loyal diplomat incapable of an act of rebellion against State Department policy, has a dalliance with the heiress, “that has a transactional nature to it, a question of getting people out,” Stoll said.They embrace. They argue. He wants to spend the night with her. She asks him to leave. Over and over the actors played the scene until Winger was satisfied that the exchange between the pair achieved the right degree of sparring and sexual tension.Fry and Gold may be on the same side, but they bicker a lot. To play the central character, “I spent a lot of time reading about Fry, going to Columbia University, where all his papers are,” Smith said in an interview in Marseille. “He was unassuming and demure, which I appreciate, yet he burned with a contrarian courage that led him to row against the tide.”A literary journalist, enamored of European writers and artists, Fry was 32 when he arrived in Marseille. He had been sent to France from New York by the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee (the forerunner of the International Rescue Committee), established by American and German intellectuals. With him he brought a list of people to rescue, including Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Alma Mahler, who would eventually escape across the Pyrenees carrying Symphony No. 10, the last work of her former husband, Gustav Mahler.Fry thought he could get the job done quickly. But as Alan Riding wrote in his book “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris,” Fry found himself in a “no man’s land of Gestapo spies, corrupt French police and refugees galore.”Initially installed at the Hôtel Splendide, Fry quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers. Continuously hounded, detained for several days in late 1940, Fry faced off with Fullerton, the American consul, who repeatedly advised him to leave or face arrest, and in January 1941 refused to renew Fry’s passport unless he returned to the United States.To the U.S. authorities at the time, Fry was a troublemaker, his effort to protect Jews and anti-Nazis a renegade operation undermining a craven official policy.The events portrayed in the show are many-faceted, Smith said, but a core truth is inescapable: “There were civilian heroes before our government was ready to step in.”Initially installing himself at a hotel, Fry far right, quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers.Anika Molbar/NetflixJacobs, who plays Gold, a sometime pilot of impetuous courage, said she found the part fascinating for its multiple dimensions. Gold makes mistakes, and her relationship with Fry is sometimes tense. He “views her as too impulsive, while she sometimes thinks he is too cautious,” Jacobs said, and yet, Gold’s moral core is clear: “She knows what she does is the right thing to do.”Englander, the Austrian actor who plays Hirschman, another of Fry’s volunteers, said in an interview on set that filming the show made him reflect on his family’s own history.“We never spoke of our Jewish past,” he said. “Grandpa had to run away — that was all we said in my family.” When Englander came to lines in which Hirschman speaks about his past before fleeing Germany, he said: “I felt my grandfather so strongly. I needed minutes of crying and coffee and cigarettes to recover. Now, I feel a compulsion to give something to life and help today’s refugees.”Fry never ceased in his search to find ways out, until he was hounded out of the country after 389 days. He was told by the Vichy police, with the apparent backing of the American consul general, that he had “gone too far in protecting Jews and anti-Nazis,” Riding wrote in “And the Show Went On.”Back in the United States, Fry wrote a groundbreaking article for The New Republic in 1942 titled “The Massacre of the Jews.” It had little effect. The slaughter continued, with Western powers doing their best to look away.Anna Winger, a creator of the show, left, was obsessed with Fry and his story for many years before she started working on the project.Anika Molbar/NetflixWriting and teaching, Fry lived out the rest of his life in relative anonymity, and died at the age of 59. It was only in 1967 that France honored him with a Légion d’Honneur, the country’s highest order of merit.During production, Smith found himself thinking about Fry as an American hero defying his own government.“There’s a real fight in America about exceptionalism, about what it means to be an exceptional nation,” he said. “Is it loving your country unyieldingly? Or is it taking a scalpel to it and looking at it honestly. This show is asking people to look realistically at our history.” More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Solomon Perel, Jew Who Posed as a Hitler Youth to Survive, Dies at 97

      by

      His masquerade — a tale recounted in a memoir and in the film “Europa Europa” — saved his life. But “to this day,” he said, “I have a tangle of two souls in one body.”Solomon Perel, a German Jew who saved himself from death by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and later felt gratitude for the Nazi he pretended to be in order to live, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Givatayim, Israel, near Tel Aviv. He was 97.His great-nephew Amit Brakin confirmed the death.Mr. Perel, who was also known as Shlomo and Solly, recounted his survival story in a 1990 autobiography. It was adapted into a German movie, “Europa Europa,” released in the United States in 1991, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film.Like many other Holocaust survival stories, Mr. Perel’s began with Nazi oppression, which led his family to move in 1936 from Peine, Germany, to Lodz, Poland. After the German invasion on Sept. 1, 1939, they were forced into a ghetto that would house as many as 164,000 Jews. He fled later that year with an older brother, Isaac, in the hope of finding relative safety in Soviet-controlled eastern Poland.In Bialystok, where he parted with Isaac, Solomon was placed by a Jewish assistance organization in a Soviet orphanage in Grodno (now part of Belarus). He stayed for two years, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941; he recalled that the Jewish children at the orphanage were roused from their sleep and told to flee the German attack.Solomon became one of many refugees captured by the German Wehrmacht in an open field near Minsk.Fearful that his captors would learn he was Jewish and shoot him in a nearby forest, he dug a small pit in the soft ground with the heel of a shoe and buried his identification papers.After waiting on a long line, Solomon was asked by a German soldier, “Are you a Jew?” Heeding his mother’s last words to him, “You must live,” but not his father’s, “Always remain a Jew,” he lied: “I’m not a Jew. I’m an ethnic German.”Not only did the Germans believe him; they welcomed him into their unit under the name Josef Perjell, and made him an interpreter. One interrogation in which he participated was of Joseph Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili.“I became a split personality — a Nazi by day and a Jew by night,” Mr. Perel told The Week, an Indian magazine, in 2019. He remained there until his commanding officer sent him to the Hitler Youth boarding school in Braunschweig, Germany, during the winter of 1941-42.If anyone discovered he was Jewish, “they’d deal with me like cannibals,” he said in “Because You Must Live: The Story of Shlomo (Solly) Perel,” a part of the Survivors Testimony Films Series produced by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. He was relieved that the school’s showers had separate stalls, which prevented anyone from seeing that he had been circumcised.But, he said, “nobody suspected me because it was impossible to think that some Jewish boy would sneak into the center of that protected country.”He became, to the young Nazis surrounding him, a true believer, absorbing the lessons of National Socialism, wearing a uniform with a swastika and a Nazi eagle on his chest and preparing for military service.“I was a Hitler Youth completely,” he said in the Yad Vashem film. “I began telling myself, ‘Wow, I’m part of a force that’s conquering the world.’”But he could not switch off his real self entirely. In 1943, during the Christmas holiday, he received a holiday pass and took a train back to Lodz. For 12 days, wearing the black winter uniform of the Hitler Youth, he searched for his parents in the ghetto.He rode a streetcar, which Jews could not board, back and forth. He walked the city’s streets. He saw men rolling carts piled with Jewish corpses.But he did not find his mother, his father or his sister, Bertha, none of whom he would ever see again. His brothers, Isaac and David, survived.Marco Hofschneider portrayed Mr. Perel in the critically acclaimed German movie “Europa Europa.” Delphine Forest played his teacher. Orion ClassicsSolomon Perel was born in Peine on April 21, 1925. His father, Azriel, owned a shoe store. His mother, Rebecca Perel, was a homemaker.Solomon was nearly 8 years old when Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, but his life did not change appreciably until two years later, when antisemitic laws stripped Jews of their rights and citizenship. He was expelled from school.“It was my most traumatic childhood experience,” he said in “Because You Must Live,” “that barbaric expulsion from school because somebody considered me different.”The family moved to Lodz after his father was forced by the Nazis to sell his store for nearly nothing. Solomon attended a Polish state school for Jews. It was after the Germans invaded Poland and Jewish families were ordered into the Lodz ghetto that he started on the path that led to his lifesaving masquerade as a Nazi.Simmy Allen, a spokesman for Yad Vashem, said that Mr. Perel’s life as a Jew among the Hitler Youth was more than unusual.“We know of Jews using false papers and presenting themselves as non-Jews, even Aryans, during the Holocaust in different places throughout Europe, even in Berlin,” Mr. Allen said in an email. “But to be in the heart of the lion’s den, under that level of scrutiny all the time and, in a sense, part of the ideology of the ‘enemy,’ as Shlomo was, is a very unique and rare position.”Mr. Perel recalled how invested he had become in the Nazi philosophy even as the war turned against Germany.“I was deeply involved in a world that had been forced upon me, my reasoning powers had finally been completely anesthetized,” he wrote in his memoir, published in English and French as “Europa, Europa,” “and my mental faculties were so befogged that no ray of reality could penetrate. I continued to feel just like one of them.”Mr. Perel at his home in Israel. He lectured widely about his wartime experiences, condemning racism in any form. Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, via Associated PressAs the war neared its end, Mr. Perel was sent to the Western Front, assigned to a unit guarding bridges. When American soldiers arrested him and his squad and briefly held him in a prisoner-of-war camp, his war was over. He was no longer Josef Perjell. He was once again Shlomo Perel.Mr. Perel moved to Munich, where he was a translator for the Soviet Army during interrogations of Nazi war criminals. He emigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, fought in the Israeli war of independence and managed a zipper factory.In 1959, he married Dvora Morezky. She died in 2021. He is survived by a son, Uziel, and three grandchildren. Another son, Ronen, died in 2019.For many years Mr. Perel put his memories of the Holocaust aside. But in the late 1980s, after a near-fatal heart attack, he began to discuss his past and to write his memoir.The film adaptation, written and directed by Agnieszka Holland, starred Marco Hofschneider as Mr. Perel. It earned Ms. Holland an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.In addition to winning the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the movie was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. But the German Export Film Union declined to select it as its entry for an Academy Award for best foreign film — a decision that prompted many of Germany’s leading filmmakers, including Wolfgang Petersen and Werner Herzog, to sign a letter of protest that was published in Daily Variety.Mr. Perel attended the film’s premiere in Lodz.In 1992, he reunited with some of his former Hitler Youth comrades and revealed to them that he was Jewish. Some years earlier, he had gotten together with surviving members of the Wehrmacht unit that had accepted him as a German.He lectured about his experiences in Israel and around the world.“He insisted on including, with every lecture or talk he gave, a message for accepting the other,” Mr. Brakin, his great-nephew, said in a text message, “including the one that is different, and a message against racism in any form it might take.”But Mr. Perel never fully purged himself of the Nazi identity he had adopted.“To this day, I have a tangle of two souls in one body,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “By this I mean to say that the road to Josef, the Hitler Youth that I was for four years, was very short and easy. But the way back to the Jew in me, Shlomo, or Solly, was much harder.”“I love him,” he said, referring to Josef, “because he saved my life.” More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Filmmakers for the Prosecution’ Review: Exposing Third Reich Atrocities

      by

      Jean-Christophe Klotz’s documentary retraces the steps of two men tasked with gathering evidence for the Nuremberg trials.After the military defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, evidence of its crimes still had to be systematically gathered for the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Jean-Christophe Klotz’s methodical documentary “Filmmakers for the Prosecution” retraces the steps of two Office of Strategic Services members tasked with this enormous responsibility: Stuart Schulberg (later a TV producer) and his brother, Budd (who went on to his own storied career in Hollywood).Part of the movie recounts the travails of documenting the Third Reich in the war’s ruinous aftermath and the challenge of tracking down Nazi records before they could be destroyed. Stuart Schulberg’s nervous letters home express the difficulty of completing the project in time for the trials, which aimed to damn the Nazis with their own imagery. To this point Klotz’s film (which has the feel of a teaching aid) largely belongs to the documentary category of archival adventure, with stories of journeys into a salt mine and encounters with the director Leni Riefenstahl and a high-ranking Soviet fan of John Ford.But Stuart Schulberg was also commissioned to film the tribunal for the U.S., and so Klotz’s documentary becomes the mother of all “making of” features. Technical ingenuity was required to shoot and light the courtroom and its infamous defendants, who watched the evidence of Third Reich atrocities during the proceedings.The trial footage became part of Stuart Schulberg’s nearly lost 1948 documentary “Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today,” which was delayed as American priorities shifted to helping Europe rebuild. It’s all a reminder of the labor and risks that go into creating and preserving essential imagery of the past, even for the most notorious events in history.Filmmakers for the ProsecutionNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour. In theaters. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      The History Behind the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert

      by

      A global event today, the orchestra’s annual New Year’s Concert took shape during dark days in Austrian history.If the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Concert is a global success, its legacy and reach rest on five pillars: a marvelous orchestra; internationally renowned conductors; a timeless repertoire, by the Strauss family and other composers of the 19th century; a splendid location, the gilded Musikverein; and TV broadcasts watched most recently by some 1.2 million people in 92 countries on five continents.The event, which returns this weekend with Franz Welser-Möst leading the Philharmonic, is by now a familiar one, and a multiday affair with three concerts. Between the preview performance, the New Year’s Eve Concert and the New Year’s Concert, conductors and the orchestra are faced with the extreme demands of an emotionally and physically challenging marathon. Just days after the series of concerts, CDs and DVDs of the Jan. 1 concert are released for sale worldwide.In the 19th century, the repertoire of today’s New Year’s Concert was part of a diverse concert business in the many entertainment venues that existed in almost every district of Vienna, including open-air stages. On weekends, this mixture of Viennese popular music, including swinging waltzes, wild polkas and military marches, enthused thousands of visitors, often as many as 10,000.Gerald Heidegger, the editor in chief of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation’s online services, rightly said in the series “Straussmania” on Topos, produced with the Vienna Institute of Contemporary and Cultural History: “Our image of the Biedermeier era is slightly distorted. It is not completely true that the era of the authoritarian state of Chancellor Metternich only led us to retreat into a private sphere, when one considers the music played in public.”This kind of popular music was revolutionary in terms of its exuberance and the physical proximity encouraged by new forms of dance, and it accompanied Vienna’s booming development into one of the world’s largest cities in the rapid globalization during the years leading up to World War I. Today, in another era of fast-moving developments in technology and politics, the music has not lost any of its emotional impact; people still seem to seek joyful distractions.The ostensible lightness of the countless waltzes, polkas and marches, however, hides a technique that challenges the musicians. Crucial to pulling it off is a nonverbal rapport between the orchestra and the conductor — another characteristic quality of the New Year’s Concert. And the selection of the repertoire requires an exciting dramaturgy in the combination of familiar and unknown pieces. This year, Welser-Möst has dedicated some 70 percent of the program to new works.In the 19th century, the Strauss bands were very much competitors of the Philharmonic, which as the Vienna State Opera orchestra thrilled audiences in the Court Opera Theater while having to play for additional income as the private company known as the Vienna Philharmonic. The conductor Ernst Theis has researched the early interactions between these orchestras and noted that Eduard Strauss gave a New Year’s concert with a 60-person orchestra as early as Jan. 1, 1871, playing not only waltzes and polkas, but also lieder and opera excerpts.A report from 1872 shows, however, that many members of the Philharmonic thought the Strauss clan and their music “harmed the reputation of the Philharmonic concerts.” Still, in 1894, the Philharmonic played at the celebrations marking Johann Strauss II’s 50 years in the business, and a few months before his death in 1899, he conducted the Court Opera orchestra during the performance of his “Die Fledermaus” for the first and last time, the final success of a remarkable career.The conductor Clemens Krauss used relationships with Nazi leaders to further his career in Germany before returning to Austria, where he led the Vienna Philharmonic in an annual “Johann Strauss concert.”Imagno/Getty ImagesThis ambivalence toward the Strauss family would change after World War I. From 1927 onward, the conductor Clemens Krauss in particular repeatedly chose to perform pieces from the Strauss repertoire, including at the Salzburg Festival. It was only in 1934, when he succumbed to the temptations of the Nazi regime and abruptly left Vienna for Berlin, that the Philharmonic’s infatuation with Strauss ended.After the Anschluss in 1938, Krauss returned to Austria and revived the tradition of “Johann Strauss concerts” (a reference to both father and son). The musician Clemens Hellsberg, writing in 1992, and the historian Fritz Trümpi, in 2011, have emphasized Krauss’s role as the initiator of the “Johann Strauss concert” — then termed an “Extraordinary Concert” — as the calendar turned from 1939 to 1940. The proceeds went to the National Socialist wartime winter relief fund.Krauss soon developed the next important pillar of the New Year’s Concert on its way to becoming a global music event: radio broadcasts throughout the German Reich. In November 1940, a contract with the Reich Radio Corporation established that there would be “four Philharmonic Academies in the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna played for Greater German Radio” — on Dec. 13, 1940, and Jan. 1 (a “Johann Strauss concert”), Jan. 25 and March 15, 1941 — conducted by Krauss.Without any intervention by Nazi potentates, the refreshing and emotionally uplifting “waltzing bliss” was a perfect fit with National Socialist propaganda, in particular its broadcasting policy — as were Mozart and Lehár. The program notes for the first of these series performed in Vienna not only stressed the intended mass impact of the contribution to “German music,” but also included ideological emphasis on the early history of waltz compositions in “suburban inns” as an “expression of the East Bavarian tribe that stood here on advance border watch,” which was, of course, a complete distortion and misinterpretation of the cultural developments in Vienna during the Biedermeier period.Joseph Goebbels, third from left, with the opera singer Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender, left, the actor Paul Hartmann; the singer Jan Kiepura; the actor Gustaf Gründgens; the Nazi official Walther Funk; and Mr. Krauss, right, at a party in 1935.Heinrich Hoffmann/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesThe politicization of the music of the Strauss family and their milieu was taken to extremes when the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels even had the composer’s partly Jewish descent covered up by falsifying the baptismal registers in Vienna. Incidentally, this act was accompanied by a diary entry in which Goebbels revealed the sheer absurdity of his antisemitic beliefs:Some clever so-and-so has discovered that Joh. Strauss is an eighth Jewish. I forbid this from being made public. For firstly, it isn’t proven, and secondly, I do not want to have German cultural heritage in its entirety gradually undermined in this manner. In the end we will be left with only Widukind, Heinrich the Lion and Rosenberg. That’s not a lot. Mussolini goes about things much more cleverly here. He occupies the entire history of Rome from the earliest days of Antiquity for himself. We are just parvenus in comparison. I’m doing what I can about it. That is also the Führer’s will.The selling point the New Year’s Concert enjoys today as a global event applied neither during World War II nor in the years that followed; it remained limited to Germany and, after the war, Austria. The former Johann Strauss concert was firmly a tradition, and Josef Krips, who conducted the Jan. 1, 1946, concert — the first to be billed as a New Year’s Concert — noted succinctly: “I began 1946 with the first New Year’s Concert in peacetime.”Krips, stigmatized by the Nazis as a half-Jewish conductor, clearly had no problem with the continuation of the concert, whose last performance had taken place when the mood was apocalyptic. The New Year’s Concert lived on as solely Austrian cultural heritage — with Krauss as conductor until 1954, followed by Willi Boskovsky, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster, until 1979.The violinist Willi Boskovsky conducting the New Year’s Concert in 1977.KPA/United Archives, via Getty ImagesIn 1959, the New Year’s Concert began to develop into an international event with its first television broadcast. The first color broadcast took place a decade later; the first overseas one, in 1972. And since 1980, the New Year’s Concert has been led by alternating, international conductors — a move that reflected its global interest.But the formative phase of the New Year’s Concert — the Nazi era — went unexamined in Austria and abroad until the past decade. Today, those years are extensively documented on the Philharmonic’s website. International music history in particular can make an important contribution to a critical assessment of Austria’s role in National Socialism, World War II and the Holocaust.In 2013, for instance, after much preliminary work, Clemens Hellsberg, then the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic, initiated a critical documentary on the orchestra and commissioned a comprehensive study by a team of historians — including me — on members of the orchestra who were persecuted, murdered or forced into exile. This was followed in 2014 by the international conference “The Arts of Vienna: A Proud History, A Painful Past.”Those artists whose lives were sidelined by the Third Reich will be memorialized with stones, placed at the sites where they last lived, that Daniel Froschauer, the Philharmonic’s chairman, will present to the public on March 23. In 2023, then, the orchestra aims to broadcast not just a rich tradition, but also a message of peace.Oliver Rathkolb is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Vienna in Austria, and the chairman of the Vienna Institute for Cultural and Contemporary History and the Academic Committee of the House of European History in Brussels.Lydia Rathkolb contributed research. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Vienna Philharmonic to Honor Players Lost in World War II

      by

      In the new year, the Vienna Philharmonic will pay tribute to more than a dozen of its members who were ousted, exiled and killed during World War II.VIENNA — When armed forces stormed the State Opera here during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” on March 11, 1938, prominent players from the Vienna Philharmonic fled through the back door and would never regain their positions.The solo bassoonist Hugo Burghauser was removed from his post as chairman and replaced with Wilhelm Jerger, a member of the Nazi Party. By the next week, all other orchestra members affected by the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws had been expelled.More than 80 years later, after the Vienna Philharmonic’s 180th anniversary and before its next New Year’s Concert, the orchestra’s current chairman, Daniel Froschauer, has decided to commemorate the players who were victimized during World War II.In 2023, Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones” for the 16 lost members will be laid in the sidewalk in front of their former homes in the Austrian capital. An additional stone will be laid for Alma Rosé, daughter of the veteran concert master Arnold Rosé. The tradition of creating these small plaques to memorialize victims of the Holocaust began in Germany in 1992. The Philharmonic stones include the name of each player, their position with the orchestra, and when and where they died.On March 28, a chamber music concert will take place in front of the onetime building of the Rosés. Also planned is a concert with the orchestra’s academy at the Theresienstadt ghetto in May.In a recent interview, Mr. Froschauer recalled arriving on New York’s Upper West Side as a student in 1982, violin case in hand, and being greeted enthusiastically by local residents of Austrian Jewish descent. Among the people he contacted at his father’s behest was Burghauser, who died three months after they spoke by phone.Hugo Burghauser, a solo bassoonist, in an undated photo. In 1938, he was forced out as chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic. He emigrated to North America.Wiener PhilharmonikerThe brass plaque to be attached to Burghauser’s “stumbling stone.” Details on it include his roles with the orchestra and the date of his death in New York.Wiener PhilharmonikerMr. Froschauer pointed out that while Burghauser was fortunate to find work through the support of the conductor Arturo Toscanini — playing in the Toronto Symphony before joining the NBC Symphony Orchestra and then the ensemble of the Metropolitan Opera — others were left to struggle. Seven members were murdered or died during the war.“There was something inside me that hadn’t yet been worked out,” Mr. Froschauer said of the effort to pay tribute to the lost musicians. “This project should a create a consciousness for what these people had to endure.”Postwar Vienna was slow to face wartime atrocities. According to Fritz Trümpi, author of “The Political Orchestra: The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics During the Third Reich,” the remaining Vienna players seemed more interested in symbolic gestures. With former party members as the majority of the executive committee into the 1960s, the orchestra’s attitude was marked by a kind of indifference, he explains in his book, and attempts to ward off responsibility.“When the question of financial compensation comes up — pensions, extra pay — the orchestra members dismiss them with at times crude arguments,” Mr. Trümpi said in an interview. “It is all the more bitter in a situation when someone is sick but told, ‘You will receive nothing, you are not here anymore.’”The Philharmonic granted modest financial support mostly because of “image concerns,” he concluded in the book “Orchestrated Expulsion,” written with Bernadette Mayrhofer. Among the beneficiaries was the violinist Berthold Salander, who arrived in New York a ruined man and never resumed his orchestra activities.In Berlin last year, a resident polished “stumbling stones” that commemorated four members of a family who died at Auschwitz. The tradition of installing the stones began in Germany in 1992. Markus Schreiber/Associated PressThe violinist Ludwig Wittels had to leave his position with the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera because he had lung cancer. According to “Orchestrated Expulsion,” requests for financial aid from Vienna led to an exchange in which the orchestra’s chairman and executive director accused him and his wife of “blackmail.” They ultimately granted a sum that was a tiny fraction of the funds allocated for a U.S. tour in 1956. Wittels died in December of that year.In 1952, seven exiled members of the orchestra were presented with silver medals celebrating its centenary at the Austrian Consulate in New York — an event originally planned for 1948. “Overdue,” read the headline in The New York Times on Dec. 21.Efforts to reconcile the orchestra with its ousted members met with resistance on both sides. The violinist Dr. Daniel Falk, who lost several close family members to the Holocaust, replied to an invitation to rejoin the Philharmonic in 1946 that a return would “raise questions” that neither he nor his “adored colleagues” were “in the position to solve.”The Argentine-born Ricardo Odnoposoff became an exception, returning to Vienna as a professor in 1956 and appearing as a soloist with the Philharmonic where he once served as concert master. The violinist Leopold Förderl and his wife, Eva, who was Jewish, also returned to their home city, in 1953.Leopold Föderl returned to Vienna in 1953.Wiener PhilharmonikerRicardo Odnoposoff also returned to Vienna, in 1956, and played again with the Philharmonic.Wiener PhilharmonikerMichael Haas, senior researcher at the Exilarte Center for Banned Music at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, said that postwar Austria in general was reluctant to welcome back former citizens who had the right to reparations because it “would have bankrupted the country.” In turn, he continued, the fact that Austria emerged from the war “relatively unscathed” may have led to resentment among Jewish families.He said that in the past decade, however, the Philharmonic had undertaken a “much more honest and sober appraisal” of its history: “I would probably say that we’ve seen the orchestra begin to confront its own past and deal with some of its issues.”Mr. Trümpi noted that there was still “a need for discussion,” and not only with regard to the history of the Philharmonic. Ms. Mayrhofer, his co-author on “Orchestrated Expulsion,” has estimated that about 100 workers at the State Opera — from stagehands to choristers — were ousted, exiled or murdered after the events of 1938.Ms. Mayrhofer has also found that Jerger, who took over as chairman in 1938, tried to save five members of the Philharmonic from deportation in 1941, but that his efforts were too late: All of them died in the Holocaust. He did manage, however, to facilitate the release of the violinist Josef Geringer from the Dachau concentration camp in December 1938 (he emigrated to New York, passing away in 1979).The Philharmonic recently acquired the correspondence of the former concert master Franz Mairecker, who remained in touch with the cellist Friedrich Buxbaum after he emigrated to London (they were close friends and chamber music partners). And Clemens Hellsberger, chairman of the Philharmonic from 1997 to 2014, is updating his 1992 book “Democracy of the Kings,” a history of the orchestra that reckons with World War II and its aftermath.Mr. Haas said reinstating repertoire by Jewish composers that was performed before the war would represent a further step in repairing cultural damage. He noted that Meyerbeer’s “Robert le diable” (performed in German as “Robert der Teufel”) was one of the most popular works at the Vienna State Opera in the second half of the 19th century. He also mentioned Karl Goldmark’s “Könign von Saba” (Queen of Sheba), which premiered there in 1875 and remained in repertoire until December 1937.The operetta composer Jacques Offenbach, who visited Vienna frequently and inspired Johann Strauss to write “Die Fledermaus,” was also well received before World War II. Operettas in Viennese dialect, such as the works of Edmund Eysler, also thrived.With the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, local traditions were altered to fit antisemitic propaganda. For example, the National Socialists modified baptismal documents to conceal the fact that Strauss had a Jewish great-grandfather, while Mr. Trümpi’s research has revealed that more than 40 percent of the Vienna Philharmonic’s programming from 1940 to 1945 consisted of works by the Strauss dynasty.The New Year’s Concert on Jan. 1, 2022, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. The concert’s origins stem from World War II.Wiener PhilharmonikerOn Dec. 31, 1939, a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic performing Strauss works served to support the War Winter Relief Program. After World War II, the tradition continued as a vehicle of hope and joy on the first day of every year.This year’s New Year’s Concert includes works by Carl Michael Ziehrer and Franz von Suppé — and Josef Hellmesberger Jr., who in addition to playing and teaching violin served as the Philharmonic chairman and composed ballets.Among Hellmesberger’s students was Fritz Kreisler, a prodigy who began his conservatory studies at age 7 and emigrated to New York in 1938. He had performed as a soloist with both the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras, premiering Elgar’s Violin Concerto in 1910 (an exhibit is currently on view at the Exilarte Center for Banned Music).Mr. Haas said that “it is only slowly beginning to seep in” to what extent Austrian Jewish musicians contributed to Viennese cultural life. Although there were also prominent doctors, scientists and writers, he explained, “music was greater than any other discipline.”For Mr. Froschauer, laying down the “stumbling stones” for the lost members of his orchestra is a moving opportunity to create awareness about the challenges these individuals faced while the rest of the ensemble was able to carry on with a degree of normalcy.“One should simply never forget,” he said. “This is a very late apology and a sign of gratitude for their accomplishments.” More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Music Thwarted by the Holocaust Will Now Be Published

      by

      G. Schirmer will publish more than 400 pieces by Jewish composers, allowing them to be heard on a wider scale.As fascism spread in Europe in the 1930s, Jewish artists and composers struggled to have their music heard. They faced persecution by the Nazis, and were banned by orchestras and cultural institutions because of their Jewish identity. Many fled abroad.As a result, hundreds of works by promising composers were lost or neglected. But a group of researchers and publishers is now working to ensure that their music is heard again.G. Schirmer, a major music publishing house, and Exilarte, an organization at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, announced on Thursday an initiative to publish more than 400 pieces by Jewish composers whose careers were disrupted by the Holocaust, making it possible for them to be performed and recorded on a wider scale.“Our understanding of the 20th century is incomplete without these composers,” Robert Thompson, the president of G. Schirmer, said in an interview. He added that it was vital to guarantee that “composers who were silenced during World War II are not forgotten and their legacies are restored.”The list of music to be published includes more than 300 songs, 100 chamber music pieces, 50 orchestral works and other pieces, in genres including classical, opera, jazz and film music. The first works will be published next spring.“The Nazis wanted a world in which the music of Jewish composers would have been banned and forgotten,” Gerold W. Gruber, Exilarte’s founder and chairman, said in a statement. “It is therefore our obligation to counteract these policies by rescuing the music of exiled composers from oblivion.”Walter Arlen, whose family fled persecution in 1939, is among the composers to be published.Exilarte ArchiveMore than two dozen composers are represented. They include Walter Arlen, a 102-year-old who was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. He longed to study music professionally in Austria, but he and his relatives fled in 1939 to escape persecution by the Nazis.Arlen’s songs and piano pieces will be among the first to be published by G. Schirmer. In a telephone interview from his home in California, Arlen said that he was humbled his works would reach a broader audience.“It’s a lovely experience,” he said. “It’s not easy to be published. I lived long enough to be part of it, to see it happen.”He added that it was important that Jewish voices are remembered. “Six and a half million Jews were killed in the Holocaust,” he said, “including a lot of composers and musicians.”Other notable artists whose work will be published include Julius Burger, a Vienna-born pianist, composer and conductor, who fled to the United States in 1938; and Walter Bricht, whose career in Austria was cut short after it was revealed that he had Jewish grandparents, and who also left for the United States in ’38.The initiative builds on longstanding efforts by Exilarte, which was founded in 2006 to recover, restore and study music banned by the Nazis. Michael Haas, a senior researcher at Exilarte, said that the works by these composers represent an overlooked part of the repertory.“It has the potential to be enormously appealing to the public and to musicians,” he said in an interview. “This is an opportunity to start investigating an area of 20th century music which has been completely unrecognized.” More