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?

My then wife had a German modern dance teacher who had been a master
student of Mary Wigmann. That's like being a psychoanalyst who did his
training analysis with Freud. She was a wonderful choreographer and teacher
and I thought a rather fine human being. One night she fell more than
usually into her cups and called us, sobbing. We went over immediately.
Until she drifted off she went on about her regret not for having performed
for Hitler, even becoming a member of the party for professional reasons,
but for the blight that had cast on her career afterwards. I don't think
she had an antisemitic bone in her body, but she certainly seemed amoral on
the subject.

That same wife looked very good in clothes manufactured by Lanz, a Salzburg
house with a US branch established just before the war. We spent a summer
at the Goethe Institute in Salzburg. One of the first things we learned was
that Lanz was the first store in town to put up a no jews allowed sign.
Most of the other stores had followed. The mountain regions of Austria were
pretty heavily nazi, tho unlike Innsbruck in Salzburg this was somewhat
mitigated by its influential concentration of Habsburg aristocracy that had
chosen to settle there.

My wife and I both fell in love with the dirndl, the traditional Austrian
woman's costume, still quite current then--tight, vested bodice, full
skirt, apron. These even were manufactured in very luxurious evening
styles. My wife looked absolutely smashing in dirndls, not least because we
discovered that under the apron was a large open area in the front of the
skirt. Enough said. It was Don Juan and Zerlina all the way.

Then back to the next year of grad school at Columbia, where my wife was in
the French dept. One day she wore her dirndl to Michel Riffaterre's
required explication de texte class. Riffaterre was a sadistic petty
tyrant. Each class he would pick a student to torture--full-dress ad
hominem public humiliation. He mostly chose men for victims, so my wife had
thus far escaped, but the dirndl pushed a lot of buttons--Riffaterre had
suffered badly during the war. In his eyes my very blond Jewish wife
apparently had become a poster child for the third reich.

I have no answers. The holocaust is always with me. I'll probably never go
back to Germany or Austria--just too painful. But I listen to Furtwangler
performances, albeit with a sometimes painful degree of ambivalence, as I
listen to Wagner or read Pound or Celine.


At 01:18 PM 1/23/2005, you wrote:
>At 12:02 PM 1/23/2005, you wrote:
>>--- Douglas Clark <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>
>> > I am upset about B\"ohm. I have his set of Mozart
>> > operas on vinyl.
>> >
>> > The names of the artists are not always given and
>> > therefore not easy to
>> > identify. Study hard.
>>
>>I wouldn't give up my Bohm Mozart personally -- I
>>figure of Yehudi Menuhin didn't mind playing and
>>recording with the man after the war I can forgive a
>>drunken remark or two--in vino veritas is usually not
>>veritas in toto, often only in in vino stupidus. And
>>this story about Bohm I haven't been able to document
>>via google.
>
>Opera people I know in San Francisco told it to me.  If it's inaccurate
>it's a bicoastal slander.  There were a hundred rumors about German singers
>and conductors who got through WW2.  Wilhelm Furtwangler had to be
>"de-Nazified."  A cloud hung over Richard Strauss for years.  Rudolf Bing,
>a Jew who fled Austria for England right after the Anschluss, and who
>managed Glyndebourne until the Met hired him to start the 1950 season, was
>reluctant until late in his career to engage certain performers because of
>their reputations, usually substantiated.  Based on the fact that Karl Bohm
>came to the Metropolitan at least in 1966 (I was present one Saturday
>afternoon) to conduct Don Giovanni, either he was an accomplished
>circumstantial liar who could cover his tracks or indeed the story may NOT
>be true.  Bing did not retire until the end of the 1971 season: his
>opinions may have softened.  When he was trying to cast his opening
>production, Verdi's Don Carlo, the first choice or King Philip II of Spain
>was the magnificent bass Gottlob Frick.  He also had wartime reputation,
>but oddly got exactly one performance as Hagen in Gotterdammerung in
>1962.  Erna Berger, a great soprano with a "rep," came to the Met in '49
>and then managed two performances in the early 1950s--all of it was
>Mozart--before she disappeared.
>
>Is this a retraction?  Maybe but not necessarily.  As you said, Bohm might
>have let the booze do the talking; and I will warrant that many human
>beings have ready access to less-than-laudable character traits when they
>drink to excess.  Some things you cannot say "I'm sorry" for and expect it
>to be overlooked.  Or he might have hidden his past with at least as much
>skill and brains as John Demjanjuk, the death camp guard who moved to
>Cleveland to work in a steel mill.  Herbert Von Karajan also came to the
>Met, 1969, to conduct Wagner's Ring and some atypical pieces ("La
>Perichole"!), and I've been hearing about Von Karajan connections since I
>started attending opera 45 years ago.  In the end I suppose--yawn--the
>music is what matters.  I'm not about to chuck my Bohm or Von Karajan
>recordings either.
>
>>  (Of course Bohm, who conducted the Vienna
>>Symphony during the war, was "involved" to some
>>degree. . . exactly what that means about his
>>recordings of Mozart I don't know.)
>>
>>McEwan took over the SF Opera in 1981 and Bohm died in
>>August of that year, perhaps he died from the shaming.
>
>The other possibility is that I was fed a bullshit diet.
>
>Involvement?  I was told a story some years ago by a rabbi in Pikesville,
>MD.  It concerned Hans Pfitzner, a so-so talented composer despite writing
>the most boring opera in human history ("Palestrina").  Pfitzner thought
>the Nazi government owned him something for his services ("I have done the
>state some service and they know it.")  So, the rabbi told me, Pfitzner
>marched into Josef Goebbels' office and demanded a State pension as a
>reward for his activities.  Goebbels glared at Pfitzner and snapped
>"Reward?  How about a one-way ticket to Treblinka?"  Pfitzner couldn't get
>down the stairs quickly enough.
>
>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