Music in Nazi Germany - The maestro and the cellist of Auschwitz | DW Documentary

I knew the piece. Today people ask me: How can you continue playing Schumann? That's stupid! How did you feel? I did not feel anything. Just get out! I didn't completely lose my identity. They'd say, "Get the

cellist

." Not “a

cellist

” but “the cellist”, I was the only one, very lucky. I directed in Bayreuth for 18 years. I was a good friend of Wolfgang Wagner, his grandson. And he showed me the measures of the score that made the Führer cry. Bayreuth hosts the Wagner Festival every year. And during the Nazi era it was of utmost importance, since Richard Wagner was Adolf Hitler's favorite composer.

The Third Reich is always immanent to Wagner. I don't think we should be allowed to separate his work from the history of his reception, impact, and ideology. That's what people try to do. They say: Well, yes, Hitler and all that, that was terrible, but the

music

is divine! Yes, the

music

is divine. But I am convinced that you can only be a Wagner lover and have a clear conscience if you are willing to face that other aspect and really fight with it. Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law, Winifried Wagner, began directing the Bayreuth Festival in 1930. She and Hitler simply got along and were on the same page when it came to Wagner and Bayreuth, and became close friends.

But Hitler also went to Bayreuth because the Wagners were like family to him; the family he never had. It was his way of getting away from everything. And I think it is important to recognize this part of Hitler, the human dimension. But the terrible thing is that a man who was basically a failed artist and a crazed philistine could plunge the entire world into chaos. In that sense, Hitler could be closer to us today than we would like to believe. Art was everything to him, he talked about it constantly. He was also a great Wagnerian, he knew the pieces well.

Wolfgang Wagner told me that he and his brother Wieland had to sit here by this fireplace and listen to Hitler, often late into the night. Hitler's presence at the festival was also a political statement that was understood. International artists such as Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini canceled their appearances. Jewish artists were no longer welcome. But others were undeterred: by 1943, Wilhelm Furtwängler had conducted at the festival six times. Hitler had a habit of going backstage after a performance, which is unusual for a politician. But that was where he felt like an artist among artists, and he liked that.

The artists were flattered and honored that the Führer had come and spoken to them, shook their hands, thanked them and so on. They were delighted. On one of these occasions he ended up meeting Furtwängler. Starting in 1940, the event in Bayreuth became what the Nazis now called the War Festival. And Wagner's music became part of the war and propaganda machinery. Winifried Wagner initially defended the cancellation of the festival due to the war, something they had already done during the First World War. But Hitler didn't want that. Hitler was determined that Bayreuth would serve as the great foundation of the National Socialist cultural project, and that was a matter of propaganda.

Although by then Hitler himself almost never attended. Since the beginning of the war, the Wagner Festival was financed by the Nazi organization "Strength through Joy." He was also in charge of the Wehrmacht's recreational programs. This meant that the audience was made up almost exclusively of soldiers. Live classical music was also performed in factories to maintain military morale. What is important to understand is that this music served propaganda purposes, and not just the music itself, but the framework under which it took place. There were certainly people in the audience who attended and listened solely for artistic enjoyment, despite the war, and to escape the grim reality of wartime, however briefly, through music.

But ultimately these performances suggested that music was simply another way to keep going. Even if the world was collapsing around them. How is it possible that the Gotterdämmerung funeral march was still being recorded in 1944? In 1944, when all resources were supposedly going towards what the regime called a “total war”? Obviously the State must have had a reason for wanting to continue with these recordings almost to the bitter end. We know that there were orchestras in most of the major concentration camps. Dachau had its own orchestra, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald. And, of course, at Auschwitz there were not one, but five orchestras in the main camp complex.

That's why we know that orchestras were an integral part of life in the countryside. We were the masterpiece. If people came, say from the Red Cross, to make sure that Auschwitz was actually an ordinary camp, they were not shown the gas chambers. They showed us, because we looked relatively decent, there was music playing, so everything must be fine. It was all a colossal hoax. Theresienstadt was the so-called model ghetto or model camp, a small fortified town on the outskirts of Prague and was established by the Nazis really to demonstrate to the world the fantastic life that Jews lived under Nazi internment.

The Nazis allowed a fully developed musical life to develop in the camp. And famously, those cultural and musical activities formed the basis of much of the propaganda film that was filmed there. The Führer donates a city to the Jews. This is very late, in 1944, I mean, it was not a secret to anyone, much less to the Red Cross, what was happening, what the Nazis were doing against the Jewish people. And the Sinti, the Roma, the homosexuals and everyone else. So I don't know why they bothered making this movie. I mean, most of the Jews had already been killed anyway.

And, of course, what happened with many of those musicians and many of those performers in the film is that shortly after they had finished their work, they too were placed on the transports that were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is part of the same mentality, part of the idea that National Socialism is a cultural phenomenon. And even among those we are murdering, we still want them to make music for us. This mentality is so perverse that it is almost beyond comprehension, but it is essential. It is integral to the way the state of Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler functioned, that music and the arts were used as part of the killing machine.

Rehearsals for a Holocaust Memorial Day concert in London. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch's grandson curated the show. Simon Wallfisch is also a cellist and singer. A musical highlight of the concert is a requiem for the Theresienstadt victims. The composer Sylvie Bodorova wrote this Requiem from the Terezín Ghetto in the 1990s, she is Czech, lives in Prague and brings a current composer to the present, her reflections on history. Sylvie Bodorova uses a theme from Verdi's Requiem as a kind of fleeting line over which the singer then sings a kind of Orthodox Jewish cantorial prayer. So I'm singing “Schma Jisrael,” basically the strongest Jewish prayer there is, above Verdi's Requiem.

I did not choose to be born into this family, and I certainly would not somehow tarnish the memory of Holocaust victims to use it for my own billing, so to speak. And I'm very sensitive about it at the same time, it's such a part of my DNA in some way that whatever I end up doing, it has a part in it. She was just a very loving grandmother, she still is, you know, she would come to all the concerts that I did. I mean, from every school concert until today. Grandmother! Well done! Smart, smart guy. Fantastic.

Thank you. Actually. Absolutely. You understood everything? Not all. That's asking too much to understand everything. Amazing, when did you have time to do that? I don't know when exactly when. When did you do that? Well, between diapers and everything else. In 1945, Anita and Renate Lasker were freed, but homeless and stateless. They had to stay in Germany for months because no country would accept stateless displaced people immediately after the war. They finally managed to emigrate to England, where they were reunited with their older sister Marianne. London is where Anita Lasker's second life began. It was easier for her to talk to my generation than to her own children, because when she was in her twenties, she was starting a family, starting a new life in a new language, she actively didn't want to bring that period of life of her.

She felt that she wanted to make up for lost time. So, she wanted to catch up on her cello studies, start a family and get on with her life. The cello that had saved her also brought her back to life. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is a cellist and founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra. She married the pianist Peter Wallfisch. She did not return to Germany for almost 50 years. In 1996 she wrote her memoirs and became known as the “cellist of Auschwitz.” Wilhelm Furtwängler remained in Germany until shortly before the end of the war. There were opportunities for him to leave earlier, for example in 1936 when he was offered the position of conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

Finally, in February 1945, he took his family to Switzerland to safety. After the de

nazi

fication process, he performed again in 1947. For example, here at the Salzburg Festival in 1954. Let's look at it from a post-war perspective. Germany's musical life had been so complicit in the crimes of the Nazi regime that it never looked back. He never cleaned himself up, never asked questions. They continue as if nothing happened, because as far as music is concerned, nothing happened. He was a great man in Germany. I don't think people should presume to judge someone in a situation they can't even imagine. I don't blame Furtwängler for not leaving everything behind and going to the United States, where no one would have known who he was.

Is so easy? We have not yet investigated how many Jewish musicians were fired. How big was the political influence? Or were people simply willing to be instrumentalized? We still don't have answers to those questions. He asked him: Where do you think all these people who suddenly disappeared went? After the war, my mother told me that the radio often heard what the Allies had found in the concentration camps. And he said to him: We can never be happy again. Wilhelm Furtwängler died in November 1954 at the age of 68. His grave is located in Heidelberg, in southwestern Germany.

In 2018, Renate Lasker-Harrprecht and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch were invited to the German Parliament. His son Raphael Wallfisch played the cello. I greatly admire Ms. Lasker-Wallfisch for the way she is able to talk about what she went through so directly. I quite liked her speech. I later wrote to tell her that she admired what she had said: her connection to the culture, her reconciliation, her big heart. There's something very moving about that. And music also had something to do with it: the Träumerei also performed for this man. In some way it all serves to demonstrate the power of music.

Life for me is divided into two parts: hell and ordinary life. The Nazis managed to destroy many things. But the music? You can't destroy that. You can try, but it's impossible.