Kaliningrad in the news

Michael Wieck  taught the violin at Auckland University from 1961 to 1967. Perhaps he injected a little European tradition in a music school that was largely devoid of it despite the competent instrumentalists teaching there. After some years Michael Wieck missed Germany, that was where he felt at home, and returned there. He was leader of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.  I knew of him while he taught in New Zealand but I was not aware of his Jewish links. In his retirement he published his memoirs, A Childhood under Stalin and Hitler. From this I learned that he was the son of the second violin and viola players of the Konigsberg Quartet, one of the first to play Schoenberg's music. His mother was descended from a distinguished Jewish family, his father was related to eminent Germans, including Clara Wieck Schumann. Some of these relatives were good Nazis. Living in German occupied Konigberg, Michael was persecuted as a Jew, though spared deportation to a concentration camp because he was only half Jewish, After the Russian occupation he witnessed the systematic destruction of old Konigsberg, a centre of German culture in East Prussia. The city was completely destroyed, to be replaced by the Russian city of Kaliningrad. During the months after the war, while the city lay in ruins Michael, a teenager, supported himself and his family by thieving, by claiming to be a carpenter, an electrician, a specialist in demand by the Russian occupiers. He could resume his violin studies only after he and his family managed to get away and move to Berlin. His Konigsberg, a German enclave in the East, founded in the Middle Ages, a seat of leaning, where Emanuel Kant taught, became a Soviet city of strategic importance because it is the only Baltic port that is ice free. Now Kaliningrad is in the news again. A couple of low flying Russian jets buzzed repeatedly over an US destroyer, aggravating regional tension. You might wonder what the American destroyer was doing there, but Putin and his military were undoubtedly showing their muscle and asserting their dominance. 

Paul Russell: The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

At times I wander among the shelves in the local library, among the many works of chik lit, dystopian fiction, far fetched realism, family stories and murder, looking for something to read. Time and time again I borrow books by renowned authors only to return them unread or only partly read. I am not much of a reader of fiction and for me to get to the end of a long novel it has to have something special to grip me. I stumbled upon Paul Russell's The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov because in this age of cheaply produced books, where publishers skimp on design, this was a stylishly produced well spaced and well laid out paperback. Credit to the publishers, Cleis. I started reading it, and was hooked. Paul Russell recreates magically the world of pre-revolutionary aristocratic Russia. The Nabokovs were eminent unimaginably wealthy nobility. He captures equally vividly Cambridge and particularly Paris of the inter-war years; the world of Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe, the opium snorting gay circle of Cocteau, the blue stocking jealousy riven  vain opinionated salon of Gertrude Stern and Alice Toklas, and intermittently the fear permeated Berlin of 1943. Sergey Nabokov, brother of Vladimir, was gay, a diffident stuttering, self-effacing, caring warm-hearted person. He comes through as a 'supporting character' in his own story, but as such he is a keen observed of the world around him. Or rather, Paul Russell observes with a keen eye for detail the world that he creates for Sergey Nabokov. There is little known about this younger brother of Vladimir, there are passing references to him here and there, and Russell weaves these crumbs of evidence into a narrative that bears the semblance of historical truth. It is a long book, and I am a slow reader, but as I approached the last pages I didn't want it to end. 

S. Y. Agnon and Saul Bellow

Agnon, the Israeli Nobel prize winning writer, and Saul Bellow, the American Jewish Nobel prize winning writer had very different takes on their 'native ground'. Agnon, then known as Shmuel Josef Czaczkes, packed his bags in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, and moved to Palestine. Saul Bellow, 27 years his junior, was firmly rooted in Chicago. Granted that Agnong then moved to Germany, where he was part of the circle of Martin Buber, Sholem Gershom and Salman Schocken, and absorbed European literature, but he moved back to Palestine, where he wrote stories of magic realism with a traditional Jewish Hebrew background. He mined the cultural landscape of Galicia he grew up in in a new Jewish country that he totally adopted, whereas Bellow, a seemingly completely assimilated American Jew wrote about the Jewish world of Chicago. So which was the native ground of each?  Buczacz of Agnon, which is no more, destroyed in Agnon's lifetime or Chicago of Bellow, or did both only exist in the imagination of these writers?  Agnon grew up among Zionists who could not imagine moving to Palestine, but he moved there and became the preeminent Hebrew writer. Bellow could not imagine living anywhere but in America, where his immigrant parents built a new life and gave Saul the opportunity to succeed. Why would anyone give up the good life in America and move to Israel? Why would anyone move to Israel from a benign peaceful country like New Zealand? Where are our native grounds? Can an imaginary Israel become and immigrant's native ground?

John le Carre's guide to understanding world affairs

By far the best television in a long time is the adaptation of John le Carre's Night Manager. Like other le Carre stories, it is about betrayal, betrayal for self interest, betrayal for a greater cause, betrayal by powerful individuals, betrayal by governments. Roper, the villain of the piece, is an arms dealer. The current big news about Panamanian secret trust accounts, and New Zealand secret trust account for laundering ill gotten funds makes me think that fictitious Roper could have been a client of the Panamanian law firm at the centre of these revelations. He would certainly not have wanted his payments to be traceable. Roper, however, is a figment of le Carre's imagination. How about Serco or Halliburton, corporations that profit from war and human misery? All this is nothing new. As a teenager I was hooked on Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd stories. Upton Sinclair, a muckraking journalist as well as a popular novelist, author of the Jungle, a book that revealed the cruelty and exploitation behind the Chicago meat works, went out of favour during the Cold Warm and his Lanny Budd novels had been out of print for 50 years, but he described the corruption, business interests and politics over the years between 1913 and 1947, a virtual history of the era. The notable characters that appear in the eleven novels include Churchill, Hitler, Goering, Hess, Stalin, and F.D.R. Roosevelt. The world they describe preys on the common man, is cruel and  treacherous. As my old mate, King Solomon, said, there is nothing new under the sun, but people's memories are short. Upton Sinclair and his stories about the dangers that beset his times are largely forgotten.

The Jewish band master - Mahler's 3rd

The performance of Mahler's Third Symphony takes 94 minutes, far too long for any piece of music. I attended the NZ Symphony Orchestra's performance of it and came away with mixed feelings. I thought that the First Movement is full of bombast, powerful brass chords, fanfare, corny popular tunes and romantic calls to action, but what kind of action? It also has distorted references to Brahms's First Symphony, a work that is the very opposite in spirit to this work. Mahler wrote descriptive titles for each movement, then, quite rightly, abandoned them. You should listen to music with your ears and your whole body, not reflect on some presumed extra musical message. After the First Movement the mood changes, and you get beautiful transparent musical passages. In the Third Movement Mahler throws in a mezzo-soprano soloist, at last night's concert Charlotte Hellekant, a statuesque woman with a beautiful, penetrating warm voice. As if this weren't enough in the next movement there is an additional children's and women's choir. This is a rich gulyas indeed. The concluding movement is a long tranquil adagio. Though this symphony is perhaps too long for my liking, it contained some very beautiful sequences. What was Mahler, 'a little German-Czech-Moravian Jewish boy', as the great American Jewish conductor, Leonard Bernstein described him, doing writing such ambitious overblown music? Mahler's ambitions were out of keeping with his humble origins, the grandson of  a Jewish peddler grandmother. He had to be the conductor of the world's foremost opera houses and orchestras, the Vienna State Opera, the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Metropolitan and the New York Philharmonic. Likewise his music had to be grander, and longer, than any other works in the repertoire. And he would throw in a little ditty about Jesus and Peter to underline his credentials as a Catholic convert, identifying Jesus with the struggling artist, though by then Mahler was far from struggling. He converted to Catholicism because this was a necessary condition for his appointment as the musical director of the Vienna Opera, but was always cynical about his conversion, seeing himself as an atheist [1]. However he was not just any ordinary common and garden atheist, he described himself as 'thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.' [2] There is the story of the emanicpated Jewish world of Europe in this long symphony 

 1.[Jonathan Carr: From Province to Promised Land,

https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/carr-mahler.html]

2.ibid

More questions than answers about the Holocaust

My next talk at the Holocaust Centre is to a Probus group, a group of elderly, (though most much younger than I) probably predominantly women. Talking to students I often start with quoting the title of a picture book that my children had more than thirty years ago: 'Why are there more questions than answers, Grandpa?' and say that I hope that they will go away with more questions than answers. The first question I might put to the Probus groups is why do they care about the Holocaust, seventy years after the event that hardly touched the lives of most of them. I might suggest that the questions are not about history, they can read a library full of books about the Holocaust as a historical event. The questions are about themselves, how they would act in circumstances such as the Holocaust, act as victims, perpetrators or bystanders. They might ask questions about their parents' generation, who would have been, by and large, disinterested bystanders. And they might ask questions about present day issues, Donald Trump, the demagogue, the know little populist, and Bernie Sanders, the eternal Jews, who asks difficult questions about social justice. Donald Trump's politics, and Bernie Sanders's might have faint echoes in New Zealand politics, so the questions are not just about American politics, and the questions could well be about Germany in the 1930s and 1920s, demagoguery, injustice, prejudice, and the hatred of Jews as the answer to questions that have no easy answers. I myself struggle with the question of why people care about the Holocaust, when historical events much closer to home, such as the New Zealand Land Wars of the 1860s struggle to find a place in the New Zealand school curriculum, yet people care, and it is my duty to engage with them and challenge them to think.

Music and conflict

The New Zealand School of Music runs a course on Music and Conflict and next week I will have the privilege of talking to the students of this course about the Holocaust. Thinking about what I might talk about I thought that I might start with the photo of the book burning in 1933. Soon after the Nazis came to power they instigated a bonfire of books. The image of this is part of our display at the Holocaust Centre of NZ. We see a large group of students, the very people who should be the guardians of culture and free discussion, saluting the conflagration of books from all corners of the world by authors whose messages the Nazis disapproved of. Goebbels announced that 'we will put an end to this Jewish intellectualism', though the books were not all by Jewish writers. It was intellectualism that the Nazis associated, perhaps not unjustly, with Jewish tradition. However, with this bonfire they put an end not only to questioning and discussion, but also to German culture. Apart from the solitary work of Carl Orff, his Carmina Burana, published in 1937, I can't think of any major work composed in Nazi Germany that stayed in the repertoire. Richard Strauss, the pre-eminent German composer of the time, fell silent, storing up his years of bitterness to give it voice in his Metamorphosen in 1945, after the war. The Nazi years were barren of culture. Contrast this with the equally ruthless, suppressive regime of Stalin's Soviet Union, just as intolerant of dissent, which however produces great masterpieces that stayed in the repertoire, Shostakovich's great symphonies, his No. 5 and No. 7, Prokofiev's War and Peace, his 5th Symphony, his great film scores. Khachaturian's concertos, Symphonies, and his spectacular ballet, Gayaneh. Not only was music sterile in Nazi Germany, there were no great books or great films produced, except for spectacular propaganda films. Contrast this with the memorable films that came out of the Soviet Union in this period. Why one oppressive regime was completely sterile, while the other managed to flourish is one question which is worth asking, a question about the role of the arts in society.