"In fiction, the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them performs only one half of his office."
Thomas Babington Macaulay, "History," Edinburgh Review, 1828
The Nazis were nothing if not culturally acquisitive. Although harshly critical of modernist art and literature, they portrayed themselves as the heirs and custodians of the great European and German national cultural traditions (the mirror image of the German Marxist claim). In some cases, the appropriation was easy. In others, a certain amount of manipulation or disingenuous treatment was required.
In the literary realm, the great Weimar Classicist writers and friends Goethe (1749-1832) and Schiller (1759-1805) stood at the center of the effort, though not all the works of these humanistic authors readily lent themselves to the messaging of a racist and dictatorial regime. Although Goethe's "Faust" could, with some gymnastics, be held up as the portrait of the archetypal "Germanic" soul, Schiller's drama Don Carlos proved awkward when audiences applauded the line, "Sire, give us freedom of thought!" And in 1941, Hitler requested that Schiller's anti-tyrannical drama Wilhelm Tell no longer be performed. Be that as it may, a general emphasis on the Nationalliteratur, reinforced by selective quotation, remained an effective overall policy.
The glorification of the national cultural tradition extended to Kitsch and collectibles. These small glass Schiller Christmas ornaments (c. 30 x 35 mm) were given to donors at street collections for the Winter Relief Work effort in March 1941.
Some recipients may actually have used them as tree decorations, but the Winterhilfswerk also offered an album for collectors.
The series,"Heads of Famous German Men," included Hitler (featured on the album cover above), historical
military leaders, and artists and composers from Dürer to Wagner. Goethe
and Schiller were, along with philosopher Immanuel Kant, the only literary figures.
It was a travesty of the German intellectual tradition. On the other hand: if only other countries took their literary heritage so seriously that they felt the need to co-opt and distort it.
This is a document that my father acquired during his service with the US Occupation Government in Germany after World War II: confiscated, or just found in his office or quarters—I don’t know. It is described as a “war diary” for a young girl. Normally speaking, a war diary (Kriegstagebuch) is an official German record of a military unit or department, or occasionally, a private record kept by a combatant. The extension of this term—rather than, say, scrapbook—to a gift made for a child is indicative of the culture of militarism and indoctrination under the Third Reich. (more background at the bottom of the page)
* * *
The Christmas entries are particularly instructive.
Weihnachten with the Wehrmacht
24 December 1940
"Our soldiers, too, decorate the Christmas tree, for it connects them
with the homeland and recalls many a pleasant hour."
In one of the most famous military broadcasts of the War, German radio shared transmissions from the Arctic Circle and Stalingrad to Africa as soldiers sang "Silent Night."
Of course the tendency to seize upon Christmas as a respite from combat was not unique to Germany. 101st Airborne veteran Art Schmitz recalled being surrounded by the Germans at Bastogne in 1944. Hearing "Radio Berlin doing a request broadcast: German civilians asking for Christmas carols to be played for their soldiers serving in Narvik, Norway; Italy; or Novosibirsk, Russia," the Americans decided to sing their own Christmas carols. "There was 'The First Noel,' 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' and others before we began 'Angels We Have Heard on High.' What we heard was the sound of angels of death overhead." A Nazi air raid began and the singing ceased, but the memory remained.
The diary pages for the two days of Christmas (celebrated for two days in Germany) epitomize the blending of the military-propagandistic and bourgeois-sentimental.
25 December
The Führer on Christmas with his personal Guard Regiment
The Commander of the Guard Regiment
SS Lieutenant General Sepp Dietrich, greets the Führer
26 December
Santa Claus with the Führer's escort team
Nazism was ideologically anti-Christian, but it readily availed itself of Christian imagery and symbols not only because they were familiar, but also because they were particularly well suited to convey the fascist message of "palingenetic" ultranationalism, or the urgent need for national regeneration: the propaganda film "Triumph of the Will" begins, after all, by speaking of Germany's "crucifixion" by the Versailles Treaty and "rebirth" after the advent of Hitler.
Christmas was in many ways the ideal holiday for the Nazis: a
convenient means to affirm their connection with mainstream society (for
even their most barbarous acts were committed in the name of
decency and middle class values) as well as to impart their own
inflection to it. Christmas was of course common to both Catholic and Protestant Germans, but the latter connection was most fruitful, for Lutheranism was associated with the national identity and heritage: the revolt against Rome; the translation of the Bible, which laid the foundations for the modern German language; and (at least according to popular tradition) even the introduction of the Christmas tree. Further, the natural-seasonal aspects of the holiday, which coincided with the winter solstice, were multivalent, allowing for easy identification with either a Christian or a Nordic-pagan message (or some combination of both), as the need dictated.
Finally, the holiday, with its themes of both domesticity and light versus darkness, could incorporate varying ideological messages about the relation between battle front and home front, depending on the course of the war: from the early expectations of peace and national renewal, to later, increasingly bitter denunciations of the barbarous enemy--whether the advance of the Red Army or the allied air campaigns against German cities--as a motivation to fight for the preservation of the innocents at home.
Thus, the page facing the photo of the soldier trimming the Christmas tree was devoted to a an address by Hitler.
The Nazis as the Peace Party?
24 December
Prepared for the Final Call!
When this war will have ended, then there will begin in Germany a great process of creation, then a great "Awaken!" will resound throughout the land. Then the German people will cease the manufacture of cannons and begin with the work of peace and task of reconstruction for the masses in their millions!
And then from this labor will arise that great German empire of which a great poet once dreamt. It will be a Germany to which every son is attached with fanatical love, because it will be a home even for the poorest.
Adolf Hitler!
If this strikes us as preposterous as well as utopian, it is because we are so detached from the perceived reality in that time and place. Today we associate Hitler and Nazism primarily with war, but we need to recall that this was not always the case, at least domestically. Another book that my father acquired was a propaganda album of cigarette cards issued to commemorate the first year of the new regime (1934), which it praised as "The State of Labor and Peace."
Indeed, as Ian Kershaw so clearly demonstrated in his modern classic, The Hitler Myth, Hitler succeeded for so long precisely because he was credited not only with achieving domestic recovery but also securing--without war--the consensus international goals of the military and geographic revision of the Versailles Treaty. This presumed evidence of his genius as a leader reinforced his standing among the loyal and cut the ground out from under the would-be critics. When war finally broke out in 1939, the German people, fully aware of what had happened in 1914, were more sober and anxious than enthusiastic, but the relatively easy victories in Poland and then in the west following the end of the "Phony War" in 1940 merely reinforced Hitler's reputation for wisdom and infallibility.
What the mother writing this diary--and the rest of the public--did not know was that peace was in fact further away than ever: on 18 December 1940, Hitler had ordered the military to prepare for the invasion of the Soviet Union, even if the war against Britain was not brought to a conclusion.
From Peace Party to Pagan Turn
Thus, when Himmler greeted the SS and their families in the 1943-44 volume of the holiday annual Weihe Nacht (a deliberately archaic spelling of Christmas, connoting pagan origins), it was in a very different tone:
Women and mothers! Men of the SS and Police!
Implacably harsh is the enemy power, against which we have to defend and augment the Reich as the legacy of our ancestors and obligation for our children. Once again the season of the solstice and Christmas summons us to the gathering of clans [a term with a pagan-racial tinge] and families. Once again the task in the longest night of the year is to yearn for the victory of the sun with the faithful trust of our ancestors. May this deep faith in the victory of the light characterize us more deeply than ever today, when we in the privacy of the family or comrades kindle our lights. The lights on the green boughs will, spanning the distances that separate comrades in the front lines and the women and children at home, form bridges between hearts.
You mothers and women truly stand, as in all the great hours of destiny of our Teutonic-German past, truly also personally in battle. The enemy's dishonorable conduct of the war has reduced to rubble the homes of many, and yet you have lost neither courage nor faith. The harsher the struggle, the more cordially the clans must close ranks . . . .
* * *
Background
The culture
About a generation ago, there was a rather sterile but revealing debate among scholars of women’s history. One view, which passed for a radical political and feminist stance of a sort, maintained that, because Nazism was a masculinist racial system, women could not have been complicit in the crimes of a regime that also oppressed them. A countervailing and more plausible view called attention to their neglected role as “accomplices,” providing the stable private sphere supportive of the tasks of the politically and militarily active males. As others pointed out, one does not have to choose between victim and accomplice: it was entirely possible for Aryan women, individually and collectively, to be both.
In 1935, Hitler declared, “I would be ashamed to be a German man if only one woman had to go to the front. The woman has her own battlefield. With every child that she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk, exactly as the woman stands up for the family.” The continuation of that battle meant raising girls to understand the culture and course of warfare.
The bibliographic object
The document takes the form of a notebook of blank pages (c. 16 x 25 cm, with lines ruled in with pencil), bound in faded purplish boards with a black cloth spine. A handwritten label (in an indeterminate hand) on the cover calls it “Kriegstagebuch For [name],” whereas the title page, in the large printing of a child’s hand reads, “Mein Kriegstage Buch [sic].” By contrast, the text entries are all in an immaculate version—thus evidently an adult hand—of the Sütterlin German script taught from 1915 through 1941: under the Nazi regime, the only one from 1935 on.
The contents consist of dated entries—generally excerpts from or summaries of press reports, speeches, and the like—accompanied by photographs clipped from newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, the book covers only the period November 1940 to early February 1941; the reason for that choice is unclear.
This book is my copy of the English edition of Ernst von Salomon's bestselling Fragebogen (The Questionnaire [1951]).
Von Salomon (1902-72) was a German right-wing extremist of the interwar years, implicated in several acts of political violence, including the assassination of German Prime Minister Walther Rathenau. Though he never gave up his extremist beliefs, he moved in heterodox arch-conservative circles and claimed that he never became a Nazi. He was nonetheless briefly imprisoned as one after the War. Several years after his release, he published his memoirs, for which he sarcastically employed the format of the lengthy questionnaire (Fragebogen) on past political activity that the Allied occupation forces used to implement their de-Nazification policy.
The translator is the World War II intelligence officer and novelist Constantine Fitzgibbon,
who also produced the English version of the memoirs of Auschwitz
Commandant Rudolf Höss. Ironically, his half-brother Louis Fitzgibbon
became a noted Holocaust denier.
The late Robert Wistrich was unsparing in his portrait of von Salomon as a typical "noble fascist" (as the German term has it): a violent extremist who had contributed to the death of German democracy and then claimed to have moral or practical qualms about the vulgar Nazis and their terror, yet profited from the regime and its backing, and after the war was unrepentant, drawing a false moral equivalence between Nazism and Allied occupation. The book, he said, "was a bitter, cynical personal testament, which exposed his utter indifference to questions of guilt and repentance."
The blurbs on the back cover, among my all-time favorites in this genre, are in the same spirit as Wistrich's sketch. (Hugh Trevor-Roper was the historian of Tudor-Stuart England who, while working as an intelligence officer in 1945, was tapped to write the account of The Last Days of Hitler [1947].)
I acquired this at Paul's Books,
one of the great used bookstores in Madison, WI (I went to school with
the kids and knew the late owner, as well as his widow, who
maintained the store and always greeted me effusively whenever I
returned in later years). I bought it because I was taking classes and doing research on Nazism. It turned out to command my interest for other reasons, as well.
It has to be one of the more unusual items in my library: because it is an "association copy," valued for the connection to the author or owner rather than for its intrinsic nature. In this case what makes the book unusual is not just the fact that it made its way from the northeast to the midwest, but the "Alice's Restaurant" connection. How it got to Paul's bookstore, I have no idea. Alice's Restaurant
Many (particularly those who lived through or developed an affection for the era of the counterculture) will know this modern folk classic and the backstory. If not, the Massachustetts Cultural Council's "Mass Moments" explains:
[On November 28, 1965] 20-year-old Arlo Guthrie was convicted of littering in the Berkshire County town of Stockbridge, and the song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" was born. The son of legendary musician Woody Guthrie, Arlo and a friend were spending Thanksgiving with Alice and Ray Brock at the couple's home in a former church. Alice asked the boys to take a load of trash to the town dump. When they arrived, they found that the dump was closed, so they threw the trash down a nearby hillside. Guthrie turned the story of their subsequent arrest and court appearance into a best-selling record.
The story of "Alice's Restaurant" begins and ends at a church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. By the 1960s, the small, pine Gothic Revival building had lost its congregation. The Episcopal diocese put the building up for sale, and in 1964, Alice and Ray Brock purchased it. After a formal de-consecration ceremony, the young couple moved in.
The Brocks were a creative and charismatic pair who had been influenced by Jack Kerouac and other members of the Beat Generation. Ray was an architect and woodworker, Alice a painter and designer. Both worked at a private school in nearby Stockbridge. They transformed the former church into a quirky but welcoming place where their students and other young people could find refuge from "establishment pressures," especially the Vietnam War and the draft.
Ray and Alice served as surrogate parents for the young women and men who camped out, sometimes for weeks at a time, at the church. The neighbors were not happy about the arrangement. They viewed the Brocks and their guests as drug-using, long-haired hippies. Agitated residents honked their car horns and yelled as they drove past; they wrote letters to the editor protesting the presence in their community of what they called a "beatnik commune."
It was in this context that police officer Bill Obanhein reacted so strongly when the church group was implicated in the Thanksgiving trash dump. That evening, the Brocks received a call from Obanhein. He had spent "two very unpleasant hours" going through the debris until he found an envelope with the Brocks' name. Alice confirmed that Arlo and his friend were the culprits. Obanhein summoned the boys to the police station.
"Officer Obie" later admitted that he had no sympathy for longhaired, nonconformist teenagers, although he conceded that they were basically "good kids." He decided to give them a scare and make an example of them so that the town would have no more trouble with hippies. He arrested the pair and put them in a jail cell until a furious Alice Brock bailed them out. Two days later, they appeared before a blind judge and his Seeing Eye dog, who "viewed" Obanhein's photo evidence of the trash dumping and convicted the two young men of littering. He fined them $25 each and ordered them to clean up the trash.
After paying the fine and completing the cleanup, Arlo Guthrie began composing what would take up one entire side of his first album. Eventually 18 minutes long, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" evolved slowly over the next two years. The first verses written recounted the events of Thanksgiving 1965. Later Arlo added lyrics critical of the Vietnam War. When Alice Brock opened a restaurant in Stockbridge in early 1969, the song found its refrain, "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant." Then, finally, there was the draft. Called before his New York City draft board for a hearing on his fitness for military service, Arlo faced a final question: "Have you ever been arrested?" In the song, his conviction for littering saves Arlo Guthrie from the draft. In reality he was classified 1A, but his lottery number never came up.
I first learned of the incident when I was in middle school. We were having a sleepover at a friend's house, and when we got up the next morning, my friend's mother said, "Alice's Restaurant is on." Because her name was Alice, I at first thought she was just referring to her breakfast menu, but then she played the album in its final version with the Vietnam lyrics, and I made another step forward in my cultural literacy.
A Birthday in Massachusetts
Back to the book. The owner, whose rather conventional bookplate graces the inside cover, wrote a long inscription on the flyleaf, recounting bicycle travels in Massachusetts with friends, culminating in a birthday celebration at which several friends signed the volume.
The last two names are those of Ray and Alice Brock. Not a book I would ask my close friends to sign, and an odd circumstance for future hippies, perhaps, but such are the discreet charms of book history.
Most Americans of all ages are familiar with Lydia Maria Child's work even if they have never heard her name. Her 1844 poem, “Over the River and Through the Wood," is the anthem of Thanksgiving, popular long before that holiday was even officially established.
Here is a fragment of one of her letters from my collection.
Of more interest to me than the signature (apart from proof of authorship) is the fragment of the actual letter on the other side of the paper, which tantalizingly alludes to the prospects of women authors in the mid-nineteenth-century literary-journalistic marketplace.
One longs to know who or what is at issue here. Child was well acquainted with the press and competition. She had to earn a living by her pen, but already in the 1830s, her increasingly outspoken abolitionism alienated some of her readers. The National Women's History Museum observes, her radicalism "created an uproar among family friends, who bankrupted Child’s magazine by cutting off their children’s subscriptions to Juvenile Miscellany . . . sales of her work in other areas suffered from the controversy over slavery."
Still, she had a following, and by the time of the Civil War, when this document was gifted to an admirer, opposition to slavery was national policy rather than political eccentricity. The common but barbarous practice of clipping pieces from famous
writers' manuscripts and distributing them as souvenirs--or holy relics,
like hairs from Peter the Hermit's donkey--drives historians and
archivists to distraction, but is as good a proof as any of the
new-found status of the author in the nineteenth century.
The Women's History Museum notes, laconically, "She joined her husband during the late 1830s in an agrarian enterprise
doomed to fail; like Louisa May Alcott, whose writing supported her
father’s family while he experimented with utopian agronomy, Lydia
Child soon needed income. In 1841, she moved to New York and edited the
weekly National Anti-Slavery Standard . . . ."
This is the story that Steve Strimer of the David Ruggles Center addressed in today's talk at the Amherst History Museum on utopianism in the nineteenth-century Northampton area. Child and her husband David joined abolitionist friends here in an attempt to cultivate sugar beets.
I never was in a place that I liked less that Northampton, nor have I ever in my life spent so unhappy a year as I spent there. Nature has been lavish of beauty, but the human soul is stagnant there. My strong love of freedom could ill endure the bigotry and intolerance that prevails. (June 9, 1839)
As for the Connecticut Valley, I dislike it more and more, every week I live. If I buy a pound of butter, it is sure to fall short an ounce … Calvinism sits here enthroned, with high ears, blue nose, thin lips, and griping fist. I would I had lived in an age when the gaunt spectre had done his mission. (to Ellis Gray Loring, February 9, 1841)
In the meantime, the Calvinism is long gone, and Child might finally feel at home in the Pioneer Valley.
It is a truism--and a typical piece of philistine thinking--to say that it is "impossible" for words, or art, to capture the reality of the Holocaust. On some level, words and art--the only tools at our disposal--are "incapable" of capturing many realities and experiences, and yet we use them to try to approximate that goal. Still, most of us would nonetheless agree that addressing the Holocaust through the arts does pose steep challenges. Just avoiding the maudlin, the hackneyed, and the banal is challenge enough--never mind actually capturing the essence of the tragedy or making an original aesthetic statement.
And what of music commemorating the Holocaust?
At first, it seems hard even to think of pieces that might serve such a debate. Commemoration and depiction have been much more the domain of literature. Still, there are examples.
When I was a kid, I was present in New York at the world premiere of Darius Milhaud's cantata, "Ani M'amin" ("I Believe") to text by Elie Wiesel. In the words of a recent review: "a meditation on the possibility of faith in the presence of unbridled and seemingly unpunished evil." In all honesty, mostly what sticks in my mind is one rather cynical adult saying he had enjoyed the Holocaust more. He was, I suspect, no fan of modern and contemporary music. I am. Still . . .
I hadn't listened to the piece in years. I enjoy much of Milhaud's music, but somehow, this one, and this particular style of choral singing never did much for me. In any case, you can judge for yourself from this excerpt.
Here, for what it's worth, are some of the compositions that I find most accomplished or most regularly play:
Lukas Foss, Elegy for Anne Frank
I've always been partial to the music of Lukas Foss, the German-born American composer who succeeded Arnold Schoenberg as professor of music at UCLA.
His "Elegy for Anne Frank" is a modest but moving piece. The elegiacal mood, crudely interrupted by variations on the Nazi hymn, the "Horst Wessel Song" (not as the Milken Archive describes it: the "German national anthem"), before returning to the original register, somehow captures both the innocence of the insightful girl and the anxiety of life in the Secret Annex. (It exists in two versions, one with spoken text, and one without, critics generally preferring the latter.)
Speaking of Schoenberg, this treatment of the Holocaust stands out by virtue of its relatively early date (1947) and its power. Although Schoenberg had converted to Catholicism, the rise of Nazism prompted him to return to Judaism. The text is Schoenberg's own, based on the account of a survivor of the Ghetto Uprising and liquidation. In the liner notes, fellow composer Nancy Van de Vate, noting that "many" regard the composition as "Schoenberg's most dramatic and moving work," describes it as follows:
The narration is in Sprechstimme, a kind of speech-singing which Schoenberg developed, precisely notated for rhythms, more approximately for pitches, Olbrychski's moving narration is uniquely authentic, yet faithful to Schoenberg's notation. The cantata builds to a powerful, dramatic climax when, at "the grandiose moment," the male chorus begins spontaneously to sing the Shema Yisroel ("Hear, O Israel") in Hebrew, the third language of Schoenberg's life. It is "the old prayer" central to Judaism, that its martyrs have sung throughout history in defiance and resignation in their hour of death. It is the dramatic climax of the piece, for which Schoenberg has skillfully prepared the listener from the narrator's first lines when a French horn softly played the opening of the Shema Yisroel melody.
The music vividly accentuates textual details throughout. A trumpet fanfare first awakens the Jews for transport to death camps. There are suggestions of military drum, unusual string effects from taps or scratches of string with bow sticks, high woodwind trills, muted brass fluttertonguing, snarls of muted horns and trumpets. The music builds to the terrifying counting off, louder and faster to prepare for the choral entry. "They began again, first slowly: One two, three, four, became faster and faster, so fast that it sounded like a stampede of wild horses, and all of a sudden, in the middle of it, they began to sing the Shema Yisroel." The sung Hebrew dramatically contrasts with the spoken English and brutal Nazi commands, and gives the work a powerful, moving climax in its only extended melody.
Here is a version narrated by the great Maximilian Schell:
I have a couple of recordings of this piece, but the following version, by Polish performers, conveniently combines it with other works commemorating the atrocities of the Second World War.
No list of Holocaust music would be complete without
Krzysztof Penderecki's "Dies Irae," or Auschwitz Oratorio.
Back in the day when I was a high school student, first learning properly about classical music, this piece was issued on a vinyl LP with a bleak black-and-white image of a crematorium chimney. Popular, too, was his "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima," and these became obligatory items on the record shelves of all right-thinking progressives who prattled on about "man's inhumanity to man" even if they didn't really know any history and could not fully appreciate the jarring, and indeed, terrifying music. They may have bought it, but I really doubt they often listened to it.
Penderecki's piece, composed for the dedication of the international memorial at the Birkenau (Auschwitz II) death camp in 1967, differs from the others here in that it does not focus on the Jewish victims. Although Jews made up the largest number of victims at Auschwitz, the camp served first for the internment of Polish political prisoners, and subversives and resisters from many countries. It is also a site of specifically Polish national mourning. Penderecki is also Catholic (literally and figuratively) in his textual choices. Although he does not use the text of the requiem mass, he draws upon the Psalms, Apocalypse, Revelation, and Corinthians, as well as Greek tragedy and modern poetry.
The piece also reminds us of a very exciting time in the history of avant-garde music and other arts, not least, when artistic experimentation flourished in the countries of the East Bloc between the tyranny of Stalinism and the prosaic repression and philistinism of the post-1967 "normalization" and the following "era of stagnation."
As Nancy Van de Vate says in her liner notes,
Dies Irae
is an atonal, extremely dissonant work employing precise notated
pitches, quater-tones, and sounds of indeterminate pitch. As in other
works from the composer's early period . . . combinations of many
unusual timbres, used both simultaneously and in succession, create
unusual textures, neither homophonic nor conventionally polyphonic.
Extreme dynamic contrast, from the softest to the loudest imaginable
musical sounds, adds further to the music's drama and intensity. The
sound of an air raid siren at the end of the second movement intensifies
a section of the music which depicts beasts and men being burned alive.
The rattling of a chain and shaking of a thunder-sheet (lastra) further
evoke feelings of fear and horror appropriate to the subject.
The chorus
sing, speak and chant with an unusual variety of vocal sounds. The
imagery of their text is dramatic and terrible, ranging from references
to the shorn hair of a little girl's pigtail once tugged by cheeky boys
at school to the triumphant "Death is swallowed up by victory" (Absorpta est mors in victoria) of the final movement. Yet the work closes tragically with the phrase Corpora parvulorum (Bodies of the little ones) which has been heard many times earlier.
Part I:
I am a great fan of mid-century modernism in all fields, from architecture to avant-garde music, but more recently, the minimalists have made their contribution, too.
Among more contemporary compositions, one that I find the most compelling is
Steve Reich, Different Trains
Trains, along with chimneys and barbed wire, are among the most common and evocative images of the Holocaust as the epitome of modern industrialized death. (Not coincidentally, a train also figures on the cover art of the final CD that I will mention.)
Using the symbol of the train, Reich's piece offers a brilliant and troubling mediation on the vagaries of chance:
The concept for the piece comes from my childhood. When I was one year old, my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since the arranged divided custody, I traveled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.
He says that the work, commissioned for the Kronos Quartet, "begins a new
way of composing," "the basic idea" being "that speech recordings
generate the musical material for musical instruments." It features recordings of his governess, an African-American Pullman porter, three Holocaust survivors, and historical train sounds from the era of his childhood journeys. It is divided into three parts:
America--Before the war
Europe--During the war
After the war
Popular music has not often ventured into the territory of the Holocaust, and that's probably a good thing. Still, there are notable exceptions. One of the truly great albums is Yehuda Poliker, Efer ve Avak (Ash[es] and Dust)
Poliker is one of the most multi-talented and influential Israeli musicians, a compelling vocalist and a stunning soloist on a wide range of intstruments. His parents were Greek Holocaust survivors, deported from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz, and at the same time as Reich was writing "Different Trains," Poliker teamed up with son of Polish Auschwitz survivors Yaacov Gilad, who wrote most of the lyrics for "Ashes and Dust." Eight of the twelve songs deal with the Holocaust, and the album became not only a bestseller and reflection of Israeli Holocaust culture, but also a shaper of it: specifically, in the shift from collective to individual commemoration, and in its emphases on the new role of children of survivors in shaping the reception of the events as the focus moved from history to memory.
Like much of the best Holocaust literature (I always think of the works of Aharon Appelfeld), this music succeeds because it is subtle and often indirect, moving around the margins of the topic, confronting it by implication rather than declaration. The result is an overwhelming mood, a persistent sense of loss.
The title song:
When You Grow Up (a subtle meditation on the children of survivors)
One of my favorite genres of medieval sculpture is the so-called Palm Sunday Donkey (German: Palmesel),
a tradition that thrived in particular in Central Europe from the
Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, when the rise of the
Enlightenment and new ideas of propriety led the Church to suppress the
increasingly raucous behavior that accompanied it. Palm Sunday
processions commemorating Christ’s entry into Jerusalem are documented beginning in the seventh century. At first, it seems, a priest or villager rode a donkey in these processions, but there were concerns over the vanity of the performer and hubris of imitating Christ.
In any case, it eventually proved more practical to substitute a
dependable sculpture for a sometimes recalcitrant beast. Both the use of
the live donkey and the wooden substitution are documented since the late tenth century.
The typical Palm Sunday donkey thus consisted of a figure of Christ
seated on a donkey mounted on a wheeled platform. Most such sculptures
were large if not life-sized and carved of limewood or oak, decorated
with colored paint.
The Cloisters and other sources speak of some 50 surviving examples at the end of the nineteenth century, but modern inventories cite 190 examples
in the German-speaking lands alone. The earliest, in Switzerland, dates
from circa 1200, and there are a few other examples from the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, but most are late-medieval.
I
honestly forget where I first encountered this phenomenon: I believe it
was in college while spending a summer studying German in the Catholic
region around Freiburg, with its great museum of medieval art. It was
probably only after my return that I discovered we had one in the University of Wisconsin art museum. (My photos are not accessible to me at the moment, but this one shows it nicely.)
At any rate, the genre always appealed to me, for it perfectly embodied
both the humanity and the majesty of Christ in church doctrine, and
the donkey (much like a nativity scene) had a wonderful way of bringing home the nature and naive charm of popular religion in rural medieval society.
The biblical entry into Jerusalem had its modern historical resonances, as well: When British General Allenby captured the city in December 1917, he made a point of entering on foot: not only out of humility vis-à-vis Christ--but also as a rebuke to the Kaiser, who on his visit had ridden in on a grand horse.
Here's a recent example, from Richard Davenport-Hines's take on:
The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth and Lamb
Stanley Plumly
W. W. Norton, pp.336, £18.99, ISBN: 9780393080995
Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal
Lucy McDiarmid
Oxford University Press, pp.212, £20, ISBN: 9780198722786
. . .
Stanley Plumly, the Poet Laureate of Maryland, has used Haydon and his guests as the launch-pad for his own ruminations on the mainsprings, ambitions and insecurities of poets and painters. It is low-cholesterol fare compared with the delectable, richly buttered concoction published 14 years ago by Penelope Hughes-Hallett on the same subject with an almost identical title. . . .
Similar infelicities spoil Lucy McDiarmid’s book, which bustles with reiterative summaries, as if she is giving brisk lectures to students with the memory span of goldfish. . . .
These two books are assiduous and assertive, but keep striking wrong notes, like a nervous guest at a dinner who tries too hard to impress. Both had a desperate need to be checked in manuscript by English readers, who could have forestalled the blunders of etiquette, nuance and fact. The parties described by Plumly and McDiarmid still sound amusing, but both authors are didactic people, whose opinions on genius, tortoises, the English class system and vaginas are not much cop.
"The table talk of the poets: dining with Keats, Yeats, Blunt and Lamb, Flint, Pound and Moore" In a review of The Immortal Evening by Stanley Plumly and Poets and the Peacock Dinner by Lucy McDiarmid, Richard Davenport-Hines relives two feasts of literary legend, The Spectator, 3 January 2015
The weather on the occasion of the first official Black History Month celebration in Amherst last year could not have been more different from what we experienced this past weekend. In 2014, some of the roughly two dozen participants wore short sleeves as they listened to UMass student and Amherst Human Rights Commissioner Damon Mallory open the ceremony.
State Representative Ellen Story and State Senator Stan Rosenberg presented the Town with two documents from Boston. The first of these was a citation from the Legislature, honoring the founding of the Amherst Human Rights Commission.
Front row, left to right: NAACP member and former Select Board member Judy Brooks, Human Rights Commissioners Sid Ferrierra, Damon Mallory, Kathleen Anderson (also NAACP President), and Gregory Bascomb.
Back row, left to right: Civil War reenactor Charleston Morris, State Rep. Ellen Story, State Sen. Stan Rosenberg
The second document was a proclamation by Governor Deval Patrick in honor of Black History Month.
Proclamation
By His Excellency Governor Deval L. Patrick
Whereas During the month of February people gather together across the country to celebrate Black History Month and
Whereas Black History Month reminds us of the struggles and personal sacrifices of African Americans, and honors their outstanding contributions and achievements, especially in the advancement of civil rights and equality; and
Whereas Massachusetts African Americans have made a great imprint upon our country's landscape:
Edward Brooke, the first Black Senator elected by popular vote; Crispus Attucks, the first causality of the American Revolution; W.E.B Du Bois, author, historian and civil rights activist; and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, one of the first official black regiments of the Civil War; and
Whereas Our vibrant African American community continues to be a vital part of the Commonwealth's rich diversity by contributing significantly to all aspects of daily life, including education, medicine, commerce, agriculture, communications, public service and high technology,
Now therefore, I, Deval L. Patrick, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, do hereby proclaim February 2014, to be,
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
And urge all the citizens of the Commonwealth to take cognizance of this eventand participate fittingly in its observance.
Given at the Executive Chamber in Boston, this twelfth day of February, in the year two thousand and fourteen, and the Independence of the United States of America, the two hundred and thirty-seventh.
By His Excellency
Deval L. Patrick
Another project of Black History Month in Amherst consisted of posters in local store windows, celebrating African American figures with a connection to the town. Two examples:
Singer-songwriter Natalie Cole studied at the University of Massachusetts.
Prolific author and former UMass professor Julius Lester. On April 16, he
will receive the 2015 Award for Local Literary Achievement
On February 1, the new Amherst Irish Association held its inaugural event featuring a talk by Boston Globe reporter (and UMass alumnus) Kevin Cullen (@GlobeCullen) on "Irish Matters: A Journalist's Journey" at the Amherst Unitarian Universalist Society.
The time was roughly divided between the formal talk and a free-ranging discussion with the audience.
Topics that came up in the latter included the changes that Mr. Cullen had seen in Ireland over the years, from the performance of the Irish economy to Sinn Féin's electoral prospects in the south, and closer to home, the Bulger and Tsarnaev trials.
In the context of the latter, Mr. Cullen praised Twitter as a journalist's tool. Although, he quipped, his steady stream of coverage lost him some followers--"People say, 'I don't want 300 tweets a day about some guy picking his nose in the jury box'"--he found it an invaluable way to cover events first as they happen and then in more systematic and distilled fashion afterward. Because it was impossible to provide real-time coverage and take detailed notes at the same time, Twitter in effect became his notebook, for he went back to his Twitter stream and used the tweets as the skeleton for his subsequent full-fledged articles.
Even death is an occasion for a good joke
Known for his dry wit and ironic view of the world as well as his reporting, Mr. Cullen immediately earned a laugh from the audience with a joke about Unitarians. Noting that he was taking a risk by being somewhat mischievous given the setting, he suggested that it was a trait he had inherited from this father. He recalled how, as a Boston Irish Catholic, he first learned about Unitarians. His father took him to the funeral of a fireman acquaintance, who happened to be Unitarian. The boy asked what Unitarians were. The father explained and then said: "You know what you call a Unitarian in a casket? All dressed up and no place to go." During the Q & A, Mr. Cullen managed to find humor in another topic involving mortality. Asked whether he had ever feared for his life while covering the pursuit and trial of notorious mobster and murderer Whitey Bulger, he shrugged, "What's he gonna do--throw a box of Depends at me? He's, like, 84 years old."
Irish-American pols old and new get the job done
The bulk of the formal talk, derived from a Globe piece last fall, was devoted to reflections on the changing profile of the Irish-American politician, from quintessential old-time Boston machine politico James Michael Curley to contemporary figures such as newly elected Boston Mayor Martin Walsh and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley (often spoken of as a potential Democratic presidential candidate). There were good reasons and historical circumstances, he said, behind the stereotype of the Irish machine politician.
As Cullen observed, the Irish, having faced vicious discrimination, saw the solution in electing their own. Being a good politician meant providing patronage: getting things done for constituents. At times, this approach collided with the ethics of the system or at least the groups that dominated it.
The clash of cultures was epitomized by the incident in which Mayor Curley impersonated an immigrant in order to take his civil service examination for him. As Cullen explained, "The Brahmins were horrified; the Irish and other working-class Europeans who would become his core voters loved him":
Curley went to jail for that impersonation, but as a political act it was priceless. The good government types were so appalled by Curley’s antics that after he became mayor of Boston in 1914 for the first of four terms, the gentle women of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay descended into the working-class enclaves of Charlestown and South Boston, to promote reform candidates who would beat back the Irish political machine.
Legend has it that one of these gentle ladies knocked on a door in Southie and was greeted by an Irishwoman holding a wash bucket. The nice lady from Beacon Hill asked the woman of the house to consider voting for her brother, one of the reformers taking on the Curley machine. When asked if her brother would be giving her a job if he won, the gentle lady from Beacon Hill was aghast. “Absolutely not,” she huffed. “That would be improper.”
The lady of the house sniffed, turned up her nose and said, “Why would I vote for a guy who wouldn’t give his own sister a job?”
Later, when the Irish no longer dominated the population, the would-be Irish politician had to come up with a new approach and voter base:
It has taken more than a generation for this phenomenon to take hold, and in that time the definition of an Irish pol has undergone a massive transformation. Being an Irish pol, for good and bad, has less to do with race and religion, more to do with sensibilities and culture.
Cullen pointed to several figures who epitomized this change. State Senator Linda Dorcena Forry, who hosts the annual Saint Patrick's Day brunch, has an old Boston Irish husband--and Haitian parents. However, he singled out the two Martys--Marty Walsh and Marty O'Malley--as exemplars of the transformation. Walsh, he noted, is the first mayor with parents who were not English-speakers: they spoke Gaelic and came to the US only in 1950. Although Walsh is thus among the most "Irish" of politicians, his worldview and politics are anything but inward-looking. He feels close to the Boston Irish, but also to the immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia who make up his working-class constituency. Said Cullen: "He really does identify with minorities, with new immigrants. He says: these are my parents."
It was an instructive lesson and a hopeful message with which to begin a series dedicated to cross-cultural exchange.
* * *
Following the lecture and discussion, the crowd adjourned to the social hall for tea and home-made scones and musical entertainment.
Rosemary Caine plays the harp
Emma Conrad-Rooney and Delia Mahoney perform Irish dance
Coming up next month:
Antonia Moore (introduced by Sam Hannigan), speaking on:
"From the Blasket Islands, County Kerry, to Hungry Hill, Springfield"
Today marks the beginning of what he hope will be a long-running series
of events dedicated to celebrating and spreading knowledge of Irish
culture.
What's the first thing that you associate with Irish culture?
Fiddle music and stepdancing? The literature of Swift, Joyce, Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Beckett, and Heaney? The monastic culture that preserved Classical and Christian knowledge and laid the foundations of European literacy and education? Or getting falling-down drunk?
Thomas Cahill brought our debt to the medieval monks to the attention of a popular audience in his bestselling How the Irish Saved Civilization, but chances are, the popular image of the nation--not least here in a college town in Massachusetts--still has more to with alcohol than the Book of Kells. I am thinking in particular of the antisocial excesses associated with the March "Blarney Blowout," which has caused such headaches for Amherst and tarnished the reputation of the University of Massachusetts.
This dilemma was the motivation behind the formation of the Irish American Association last fall, comprising people from many walks of life--from academics, students, and artists, to ordinary citizens; some of them, Irish, some of Irish heritage, others merely attracted to Irish culture. To be sure, no one seriously blames Ireland and Irish culture, as such, for the Blarney Blowout idiocy, but the members of the association saw here an opportunity not only to refute the stereotype of the crude habitual drunk, but also to create positive programming around Irish culture.
It of course seems particularly fitting in Massachusetts, including Amherst.
The Irish came to Amherst in the middle of the nineteenth century and found employment primarily in factory labor and domestic service. They settled near the rail depot and factories, and in two other areas of town, whose informal names reflected their presence: "Irish Hill" (east of Mount Pleasant), and "the curragh" (corresponding to today's north Sunset Avenue).
The Amherst Community History Mural, commissioned by the Amherst Historical Commission, depicts not only the town's famous residents, but also anonymous common people, including this group of five Irish women workers from the Burnett straw and palm leaf hat factory, derived from a photograph in the collections of the Jones Library.
Those familiar with Emily Dickinson's poetry will also be aware of the prominent role that the Irish servants such as Maggie Maher and Tom ("One-armed") Kelley played in her life and work. Although the young Dickinson made some horrific comments about the Irish, her attitudes changed as she came to know them. Aife Murray argues that the servants, rather than simply providing the leisure that enabled Dickinson to write, played a much more active role and collaborative role in that creative process. In her view, Maher eventually became "confidante, protector, independent spirit, and co-worker in a day-to-day existence of camaraderie that crossed class lines." And as the Emily Dickinson Museum reminds us, Dickinson broke with convention in death as in life: "Defying customary practice, she requested that six of the Homestead workmen, rather than the town's leading citizens, carry the casket at her funeral. Thomas Kelly [sic], who had married Margaret Maher’s sister Mary, served as the chief pallbearer."
The founding organizers of the Irish American Association, Íde B. O'Carroll and Sam Hannigan, approached me--as a member of the Select Board--in order to keep the Town abreast of their plans and see how we could collaborate in the effort to create a safer and more positive community atmosphere.
The association decided that an official proclamation would be the ideal means to call attention to this effort. After all, the Town of Amherst honors its Puerto Rican heritage each year (proclamation; video) but has never noted the contributions of the Irish to Amherst and Massachussetts.
The Select Board issued the following proclamation last Monday night in a meeting with an abbreviated agenda as we prepared for the blizzard:
Town of Amherst, Massachusetts Proclamation
Amherst Irish Day, February 1 - Brigid's Day/Lá le Bhríde
WHEREAS, America has welcomed Ireland's emigrants to its shores for centuries, particularly during and after the Great Famines of the 1840s, and continues to do so into the twenty-first century.
WHEREAS, Irish people contributed to the history of Amherst through their labor as factory workers and domestic servants, they continue to enrich the civic, academic, cultural and commercial life of the town today.
WHEREAS, On this day, February 1st, Brigid's Day/Lá le Bhríde, we recognize our Celtic origins, the name most associated with Irish domestic servants in America, and Ireland's first native saint, St. Brigid (for whom the Catholic church in the center of Amherst is named).
THEREFORE, We declare February 1st as the day on which to celebrate Irish heritage in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, and designate it as an appropriate day on which to launch the Amherst Irish Association's Event Series 2015, dedicated to exploring the myriad aspects of Ireland's diaspora, culture, and society.
Today's inaugural event:
"Irish Matters, a Journalist’s Journey" Kevin Cullen,
columnist at the Boston Globe, recipient of the Livingston Award, and
co-author of the New York Times best-seller “Whitey Bulger: America’s
Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice”, comes back
to the town of his alma mater, UMass Amherst.
No entry fee –suggested donation, $5-10, welcome at the door.
Following the event, from 4-6, complimentary tea and scones will be provided, accompanied by Irish music and dancing.
Amherst Unitarian Universality Society, 121 North Pleasant Street.
Of course, everyone's mind is on the Patriots and the Superbowl, but kickoff isn't until 6:30, so do please join us.
Ever since Isaiah had a vision of men beating their swords into ploughshares, it has been pleasant to imagine or witness other examples of the tools or symbols of war being converted into those of peace. I've posted a couple of examples over on the Tumblr.
A pretty pin marking the proverbial bloodiest day in British military history. Would you consider it strange to wear jewelry commemorating a contemporary war or battle, say, the Iraq or Afghanistan wars? the battle of Falluja? Or maybe 9-11.
Probably. But when we stop to think about it, is it really so foreign to us? The American penchant for populism has produced countless t-shirts and bumper stickers marking military campaigns and national tragedies--including 9-11. Military veterans often sport baseball caps noting their units, ships, or the wars they served in. President Clinton and other dignitaries even wore rather incongruous-looking commemorative baseball caps at the signing of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty.
Over on the Tumbler, a look at this Artifact of the Moment involving World War I and soldiers' gifts to loved ones:
Rushing around in August, I somehow omitted mention of a nice little story relevant to my post about Melville and Hawthorne. The fateful meeting of those two men in the Berkshires in 1850 was the beginning of a fertile friendship, as Melville set to work on Moby-Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne.
Now, as we all know, Moby Dick, although one of the greatest American novels, was a commercial failure. It is with this fact that David Sugarman begins his essay on Melville in Tablet Magazine:
Herman Melville, the popular writer of adventure stories, all but lost his readership with the publication of Moby-Dick; or The Whale. “Mr. Melville has survived his reputation,” one critic wrote in 1851 of the “imposing” novel, with its diatribes, tangents, and verbosity. “If he had been contented with writing one or two books, he might have been famous, but his vanity has destroyed all his chances for immortality, or even of a good name with his own generation.” While some reviewers recognized the greatness of Moby-Dick, it failed to achieve the success Melville had hoped for, selling only a scant 3,100 copies during his lifetime. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” he lamented to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, “I shall die in the gutter.”
However, the "failure" of the novel is just the point of departure (no pun intended) for the real subject of the piece: the resultant trip that Melville took to the Middle East in 1857 as a sort of spiritual and psychological compensation. (And in the process, Sugarman gets to talk about Pittsfield and the Berkshires and the present-day Call Me Melville celebrations.)
There is quite a tradition of such trips to the "Holy Land" in the nineteenth century. Mark Twain undertook one, too, and didn't like it much better. As the subtitle of the essay puts it, "The Moby-Dick author sought spiritual connection on an 1857 Holy Land trip. He found dust and rocks instead." Sugarman sees Melville's frustration as a reaction to both the objective decrepitude of the scene and the particular disappointment that he felt as someone who, although neither observant nor orthodox in belief, nonetheless intellectually and psychologically identified with the Christian tradition.
Worth a read. And a look, just for the whimsical image of the white whale's tail by Rockwell Kent superimposed on a historic photograph of the Ottoman-era walls built by Emperor Suleiman the Magnificent.
