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  • Plus ca change - Wagner and Hitler

    On the ‘Tannhäuser’ scandal (see previous posts): If the Jewish community feels it has to stand up for Wagner, then surely that speaks volumes of the over-zealous coming-to-terms of German opera directors whose enthusiasm for Wagner-bashing knows no bounds.

    And all of this in the proclaimed interests of “guilt and atonement”, as if blaming the Holocaust on Wagner says anything about guilt, let alone atonement. Rather it transports responsibility back into the nineteenth century, dumping it on what is pejoratively imagined as the slag-heap of romanticism. Making Nazis of Wagner’s characters is little better than throwing litter into someone else’s garden.

    When directors set Wagner in the Third Reich, it is a sign of intellectual impoverishment. For “a daring production exposing the fascism of Wagner’s world”, read “the director has nothing new to say”. Question: Do you like Wagner in traditional costume? Answer: No, I am fed up of SS men.

    One wonders how anyone who has read “Tannhäuser” can possibly see the Holocaust in it. This is not a matter of discovering subtexts, but of massive, wholesale distortion that tells us nothing about Wagner, or the Holocaust.

    Please, please – no more Hagens as Himmler, or Siegfrieds as Heydrich. I’d rather see a production set in Alice in Wonderland.

  • More on Nazified Wagner...

    Thanks to Chris for pointing out an article in 'The Guardian' on the controversial staging of 'Tannhaeuser' in Duesseldorf (see previous post):

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/may/09/wagner-opera-pulled-walkouts

    There is a short video about the production in German at

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTAwYixpfvU

  • Venus as Nazi

    The German Opera House on the Rhine sounds like a cosy kind of place, but you would be wrong to think that. Burkhard Kosminski’s production of Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser’ transports the action into the Nazi period. While this is in itself not unusual, Kosminski takes the idea rather far. The Venusberg, Venus’s love-grotto, is turned into a site of Nazi atrocities, with Venus herself dressed as Nazi, and SS men indulging in a killing spree which Tannhäuser is forced to participate in. So far did Kosminski go, indeed, that the local Jewish community felt moved to defend Wagner against the suggestion he was advocating a future Holocaust. The premiere was greeted with a chorus of boos; so strong were the protests against the production that the Opera House has decided to take the production off the stage and perform it concertante. Some members of the audience were so distressed by the Nazi killing-scenes, apparently, that they needed medical treatment afterwards.

    See
    http://www.zeit.de/kultur/musik/2013-05/tannhaeuser-duesseldorf-reaktion

  • Puzzled by UKIP

    Given the friends and relatives who recently took it into their heads to vote for UKIP, I decided tonight to take a closer look at the party's website - unfortunately it seems to be down (or is it my browser?). Still, Google shows me a snippet of the Party's self-definition as 'libertarian and non-racist'. Defining yourself as what you are not - and what, in this case, you self-evidently shouldn't be anyway, not if you are worth your political salt - rather than what you are doesn't inspire me with confidence. But then this is only a snippet... Perhaps the website, when I can access it, will tell me about what UKIP is, rather than what it is not. Or is it what it is not? Maybe that explains its attraction. Rather than vote for people who say what they are for and then don't bother to put that into practice (this was a commonly heard complaint in recent days), why not vote for people who say what they are not and then put that into practice? So what will UKIP's non-racism look like if they get into power? I wonder.

  • British crimes in Kenya

    Thanks to Chris for pointing out this article in 'The Guardian' on British crimes in Kenya, and the way we have tried to deny them, and cover them up.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/05/kenya-evil-empire-editorial

  • Our Mothers, Our Fathers - Ad nauseam...??

    It seems that ZDF (the German television channel which broadcast ‘Our Mothers, Our Fathers’) has reacted to criticism from Poland (about the film’s representation of Polish anti-Semitism) by planning a documentary on Poland under German occupation. It is due to be shown in June.

    http://www.tagesspiegel.de/medien/unsere-muetter-unsere-vaeter-zdf-reagiert-auf-polen-kritik-mit-neuer-doku/8046566.html

    The makers of “Our Mothers, Our Fathers” have defended themselves by pointing out that they have only depicted what was historically true: there was Polish anti-Semitism during (and after) the war, and there was even Polish anti-Semitism within the Polish resistance.

    The trouble with “Our Mothers, Our Fathers” is that its commitment to historical truth is rather intermittent over the course of the series.

    While the Poles object to the one-sided (or false) portrayal of Polish resistance, I think the problem lies elsewhere.

    I am still working from memory here, but my impression from the series was this. It shows us, right at the beginning, a friendship between a Jew and a group of Germans, one of whom is his lover. The Germans go off to war, in their various ways, while the Jew’s lover tries to protect him from the Nazis. But he is deported. On the way to Auschwitz, he escapes along with a female Polish prisoner. Together, they fall into the hands of Polish anti-Nazi resistance fighters. Some of these appear to be anti-Semitic, and they have conversations with anti-Semitic Polish farmers. When they discover there is a Jew in their midst, they nearly kill him. At the end, the Jew is reunited with the surviving members of the German group with which he used to be friends. There are tensions between them, but cracking open a bottle of wine hints at reconciliation.

    This tendentious narrative reroutes the Jew so that he ends up not in the hands of German anti-Semites at the murder factory of Auschwitz, but in the hands of dastardly anti-Semitic Poles hiding out in the countryside. That is the problem. He is taken from the midst of friendly Germans and plunged into the midst of Polish Jew-haters. Yes, the film shows us the Wehrmacht involved in hideous crimes, and it shows the killing of Jews by German SS. It shows us an anti-Semitic woman in Berlin. But the main group of Germans upon whom it focuses are friendly towards Jews (despite one moment of casual denunciation, admittedly), while the group of Poles upon whom it focuses are generally anti-Semitic. The anti-Nazism of the Poles is rather tarnished by their racism, while any suggestion that the group of Germans in question might be Nazis is rather undermined by their embrace of a Jew. Es gibt einem schon zu denken. For historical truth to be more consistently told – and the film’s makers evoke it in their defence, so we are entitled to judge them by its standards – we would need to see more of German anti-Semitism as a popular and endemic phenomenon than the film cares to show us.

    I have no interest in defending Poland against the charge of anti-Semitism. We know about Jedwabne, and Kielce. Nor have I any interest in insisting that German historical film should always portray German anti-Semitism. But the application of double standards by ZDF in their mobilisation of the notion of “historical truth” deserves the criticism it gets.

    Have I now written off a series I at first liked? Not quite. I still think the scenes set at the eastern front, showing the German Wehrmacht sliding towards crime, are frank and painful and honest. But other parts of the film worry me more.

  • Hitler's Diaries

    "Die Welt" also has an interesting article today on how Hitler's (supposed) diaries came to be published in the German magazine "Stern" in 1983, see

    http://www.welt.de/geschichte/article115051078/Wie-die-Hitler-Tagebuecher-in-den-Stern-kamen.html

    See also

    http://www.focus.de/kultur/vermischtes/stern-hitler-tagebuecher-blind-vor-euphorie_aid_954272.html

    I think there is also an article on this in this week's "Die Zeit", but cannot find the link.

  • Our Mothers, Our Fathers

    For Gerhard Gnauck's criticism of "Our Mothers, Our Fathers" in "Die Welt", see

    http://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article115006449/Die-Empoerung-der-Polen-ist-berechtigt.html

  • Polish ambassador protests

    The Polish ambassador in Berlin, Jerzy Marganski, has protested against the representation of the Polish resistance fighters as anti-Semitic in the recent German TV series "Our Mothers, Our Fathers" (see previous posts). Anyone watching the series, Marganski writes, would never guess that most of the trees in Yad Vashem were planted in honour of members of the Polish resistance. Marganski thinks that the film conveys the impression that other people apart from the Germans were guilty of the Holocaust. See

    http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2013-03/weltkriegsdrama-polen-protest

    According to the newspaper taz, however, Marganski has since toned down his criticism, objecting rather that the film does not portray the whole truth. See

    http://www.taz.de/!113698/

  • Death in the Baltic

    A couple of years ago, I published an edited book in German on the sinking and memory of the 'Wilhelm Gustloff' ("Die Wilhelm Gustloff: Geschichte und Erinnerung eines Untergangs"). Now, Cathryn J. Prince has written a very readable general account of the sinking, using eye-witness reports and other, in part new sources. She contextualises the ship's history, particularly the sinking, very well. Recommended reading! The title is "Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff", published by Palgrave Macmillan.

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Baltic-Sinking-Wilhelm-Gustloff/dp/023034156X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364721920&sr=8-1

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