At 02:35 PM 1/23/2005, you wrote:
>Everyone who didn't leave or go into self-imposed retirement carries a
>stain, those who toadied more so. But what does that leave us? There were a
>lot of Germans--do we dismiss them from consciousness? To what extent does
>Furtwangler get a pass for resisting the murder of his Jewish musicians,
>but of no one else? To what extent do we condemn those without the means or
>courage to leave and with no other way to feed themselves and their
>children than to conform publicly?

For the sake of space I'm editing out the rest, but there are more
accumulating "points taken" here than I can count. How did we get to
Orwell? Anyway....

Ever the reductionist, I am reduced to inferring somewhat cynically that
human beings are capable of the entire range of behavior when placed under
unnatural stress, but that most will behave self-servingly if not in direct
cooperation with voices of Power. But who among us, for example, counts
him- or herself as part of that majority? Indeed, who can really
tell? I'm not sure most people have a clue about what they would do if
(God forbid) a regime like Hitler's or Stalin's came to power here. Some
small and heroic number might behave like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and sacrifice
themselves. Others like Toscanini would leave on principle. Still others
like Otto Klemperer, a Catholic convert from Judaism, nevertheless would
have the foresight to imagine the unimaginable and save themselves.

Whatever one thinks of Poem Without a Hero (if we can not open that door
again), would anyone care to dispute Akhmatova as risk-taker?

I have asked myself this question or one of its variants a thousand times
if not more: if a thug dictatorship came to this country, what would I
do? Run and duck by trying to melt into the Majority? Emigrate? Shut my
mouth? Fight back? Richard Strauss walked a fine line between a deep
friendship with Stefan Zweig--abruptly ended via intercepted letters
courtesy of Dr. Goebbels--and writing the anthem for the 1936 Berlin
Olympics: in the end, I imagine that Goebbels went to his overdue grave
satisfied that he'd frightened into run-and-duck mode an ordinary man who
happened to be one of the 20th century's great composers. Is martyrdom the
required price to prove you're not One of Them? How many of us would fail
the test of moral assuredness and physical bravery? Strauss perhaps
defines "good German," a term that surely drove Daniel Goldhagen to
publishable fury several years ago as it did his Survivor father before
him: I knew Erich Goldhagen slightly at Hunter College, and if he paid a
horrible price to reach his positions, those positions nevertheless were
absolutely unbending in opposition to any form of moral compromise and, as
I recall, even secularism. Yet I am not at all sure that many of us, if
put to the test, would not behave like Strauss or, in Russia, Shostakovich
and Prokofiev. Would we be abetting the thing we fear most? Finally, IS
silence a form of consent?

Ken

-------------------------------------------------
Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com
"This is the best of all possible worlds only because it is the only one
that showed up."-- Russell Edson