April 2000 - Nr. 4
Views and Reviews
by Alidë Kohlhaas
Last
month this column praised the Burlington Little Theatre’s (BLT) The
Winslow Boy. There is more good news. BLT garnered several awards at the
Western Ontario Drama League Festival 2000: Outstanding Performance by a
Juvenile to Julian Frid (Ronnie Winslow); Outstanding Performance by an
Actress to Jo Skilton (Grace Winslow); Outstanding Performance in a
Supporting Role to Matthew Willson (Dickie Winslow); Best Visual Production
to Dani Podetz for the set design of The Winslow Boy. BLT’s next show
opens April 22. Hart to Heart features Lorenz Hart’s tuneful songs. For
tickets call (905)637-1728.
Autumn Leaf Performance (ALP) produces extra-ordinary works. From April 20 to 29, Toronto’s small Artword Theatre will feature the inspired mix of Canadian composer Gary Kulesha and ALP’s artistic director, Thom Sokoloski. The composer will conduct the debut of the Autumn Leaf Chamber Ensemble in two works by Arnold Schönberg in settings conceived and directed by Sokoloski.
Schönberg’s
Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) was his first major work.
Inspiration for the 1899 string sextet was a Richard Dehmel poem. It still
shows the influence of Brahms and Wagner on Schönberg, and reveals intense
feelings through rich harmonies and long soaring melodies. Dancer Susanna
Hood will interpret the music .
The 1912 Berlin melodrama, Pierrot Lunaire, is judged Schönberg’s most influential work. In it he began to desert tonality, and with Albert Giraud’s poetry, added Sprechgesang (speech-song) to his music. Mezzo soprano Fides Krucker will perform Pierrot. For tickets call (416) 504-7529.
Random House has just released Victor Klemperer’s I will Bear Witness, A Diary of the Nazi years 1942-1945, thus completing the most important personal record of Hitler’s Germany. A year ago this column spoke of "witnessing a slow strangulation, not so much physically as psychologically" while reading the diary’s first part, the years 1933-1941. This new volume takes one beyond the psychological effects the ever-tightening anti-Jewish edicts had on the victims of these horrendous dicta. Now one witnesses the physical abuse, then the death of most of the people with whom the Klemperers are forced to live in the Judenhäuser (Jews’ houses).
Writing about atrocity at this soon-to-be Easter time may repel some, but, in reality, this is a good time to raise the subject. Facing the past offers promise of redemption, and spiritual rebirth. It is this promise that allows one to read this diary without succumbing to utter despair, for it is further evidence against the hollow litany of "I didn’t know."
Decrees against the wearers of the yellow star were issued publicly. Soldiers, home from the eastern front, told tales of great inhuman acts carried out against Jews. People vanished from one day to the next in local Gestapo prisons. Their bodies, bearing torture marks, were returned to the Jewish community for burial with official claim that they had committed suicide. Buchenwald, Dachau, Theresianstadt were all well-known names. Those, who faced being sent to the first two knew certain death awaited them. The latter was originally seen as a haven by the claustrophobic Jews’ houses residents. But, soon evidence came that this place, too, meant death for many. True suicide by those awaiting transportation now became common. The Klemperers attended many a funeral at the Jewish cemetery of Jews, and Christians, like themselves, whose faith was disallowed.
Klemperer managed to record events despite the constant Gestapo raids on the houses. Luckily, he had an Aryan friend, who at her own personal risk hid the diaries for him.
The diary is a record not only of daily life, but also of military advances and retreats. It tells of the difficulty of having to live in a group home with people of different backgrounds, opinions and beliefs. There is a split between German Jews and those of eastern European origin.
An entry of June 28, 1942 records a conversation Klemperer had with an eastern Jew, who hated all things German. Klemperer writes of himself: "And even if I hated Germany, I would not thereby become un-German, I could not tear what was German out of me. And I would like to help rebuild things here." This enduring belief in the good in Germans is underlined when he tells of strangers walking up to him, the outcast with the yellow star, to express sympathy with his plight. It is sympathy given at personal risk to the giver.
Klemperer escapes the "Final Solution" only through another tragedy, the destruction of Dresden. Forced to flee the city, he removes his yellow star as he and his wife make their way on foot to Munich. They experience the end of the war and the months following in the relative safety of American occupation, yet their need to go home, to reclaim their confiscated house, is stronger than their fear of living under the Russians.
The book ends with their return to their home in Dölzschen, on June 10, 1945. It had taken the elderly couple 15 days to get there from Munich. [I Will Bear Witness, A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945, Random House, 556 pages, $44.95]
Journalist Ron Rosenbaum spent more then a decade on his book, Explaining Hitler. He talked to some of the greatest historians, philosophers, and psychological archeologists, who dedicated their lives to understanding, or unearthing the reasons for and the why of Adolf Hitler. In part he wanted to rescue from "the limbo of historical oblivion" the work of journalists, who in the 1920s began to warn Germans against the impending disaster awaiting their lives if Hitler and his cronies were to gain power. These were the writers and editors of the Münchner Post, a paper Hitler’s party called "die Giftküche", the Poison Kitchen. They sensed the potential for evil, yet their exposés were ignored at home and abroad. There was also the editor of the Gerade Weg (The Straight Path), Fritz Gerlich, whose paper was both anti-Marxist and anti-Nazi. He was sent to Dachau for attempting a desperate gamble five weeks after the seizure of power, and the stilling of all opposition newspapers.
Rosenbaum recounts how on March 9, 1933 "storm troopers burst into Gerlich’s newspaper office, ripped his last story from the presses, beat him senseless, and dragged him off to Dachau, where he was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934." No one knows the subject of Gerlich’s exposé, though theory centres on the details of the death of Hitler’s half-niece, Geli Raubel.
What propelled Rosenbaum into the book was the recounting of Gerlich’s final days by his last living colleague, Dr. Johannes Steiner. The old man’s memory was at times fragmentary, but ". . . there was one moment, one memory he preserved with frightening clarity for six decades: a memory of the Gestapo and Fritz Gerlich’s spectacles," Rosenbaum wrote.
The day he was killed, "Hitler’s thugs chose a cruel and chilling way to notify Gerlich’s wife . . . ‘They sent to his widow, Sophie, Gerlich’s spectacles, all splattered with blood’."
Rosenbaum delves into Hitler’s obscure past and life, and also into the minds of those who have tried to explain him, and consequently often ended up to mythologize and mystify him.
Now one wishes that someone could solve the real mystery, namely what made the German people fall under the spell of a self-centred, sociopathic nonentity. [Explaining Hitler, Harper Perennial, 427 pages, $23.50].
Comments to: alide@echoworld.com
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