Straight Up |: May 2008 Archives

By William Osborne, guest blogger

This spring the Vienna State Opera presented an exhibit exploring its collaboration with Nazism during the Third Reich. The International Herald Tribune published an excellent Associated Press article about it entitled "Vienna State Opera comes to terms with its purge of Jews 70 years ago."

The article begins this way:

VIENNA, Austria: A famed conductor, a lowly laundress, singers, dancers, musicians. Jews, part Jews, or married to Jews, they were all a valued part of Vienna's opera family -- until the Nazis came.

First to go was ballet teacher Risa Dirtl.

She was a 14-year veteran of the Vienna State Opera. But her husband was Jewish -- and so she was purged just three days after Austrians thronged a huge central square in their capital 70 years ago to accord a delirious welcome to Adolf Hitler.

"The directorate is obliged to inform you that you are relieved of your duties as ballet school teacher, effective immediately. Heil Hitler!" says Dirtl's yellowed notice note dated March 16, 1938.

[T]he brusque letter of termination is only one of hundreds of documents on display reflecting the fate of "racially impure" opera employees or ones with spouses fitting that category after Austria was absorbed by Nazi Germany 70 years ago.

Within weeks, 95 people were purged and the exhibit -- part of larger nationwide commemorations of the "Anschluss" -- mostly focuses on them, documenting not only careers that came to an abrupt stop with the Nazi takeover but lives that sometimes ended in a Gestapo-run death camp.

The exhibit was initiated by the State Opera's director, Ioan Holender. In an interview, Holender stresses that there were three general groups of people during the Holocaust: victims, perpetrators, and observers. He notes that the "observer" group is often overlooked -- all those people in Germany, Austria, and throughout the world who looked on and did nothing, even though the extreme abuse, disappropriation, and violence against Jewish people invoked by the Nuremburg Laws was out in the open for years. It was completely obvious that these actions were leading toward genocide, and yet people continued to do nothing even as massive numbers of Jews began to disappear never to be heard from again.

This is a very valuable exhibit and statement for Austria as a whole, but it is also extremely ironic, because the Vienna State Opera Orchestra (which in its private configuration is the Vienna Philharmonic) continues to exclude people on the basis of race. For documented details see the articles section of my Web site. [Also mouse the photo, above, for the caption; then click. -- JH]

And of course, this irony is only increased if we once again consider all of the "observers." The Vienna Philharmonic is the oldest, most famous, best selling, most watched symphony orchestra in the world, and yet its racial ideologies are a taboo subject. It is one of classical music's dirty secrets. We speak of all those proverbial Good Christian Germans and Austrians who didn't see anything back then, but what about today?

What about the Board members of Carnegie Hall who present the orchestra in a series of concerts every year and who never say anything about the orchestra's racist employment practices? Are they Good Christian Germans too? And what about the American, German, and Austrian press? And for that matter, what about the Internationaler Arbeitskreis Frau und Musik, and the FrauenMusikForum which have never published a single article about the Vienna Philharmonic's employment practices?

When you start looking at these "observers" you find yourself so deep in shame, and embarrassing hostile tension that you just want to go along with the silence. Is that the right thing to do?

It was courageous for Ioan Holender, who is himself Jewish, to mount this exhibit. Those who address the Holocaust in Germany and Austria's music world can all too often still face deep resentment and ostracism. Holender will soon retire. I think that might be why he waited until now to present this exhibit.

Guess where this sentence is from:

[T]he half-Kenyan-by-way-of-Hawaii candidate, who only recently completed a beer-and-bowling tour to impress blue-collar Midwesterners, has committed more fully to showing off his inner Jew.

It comes from a front-page news feature in this morning's New York Times. If I hadn't read it myself over breakfast, I might almost have guessed it came from der Stürmer. (And I think the reporter who wrote that sentence is Jewish, no less.)

Were her editors reading with blindfolds on? Or was it their intention, as a friend of mine believes, to crank up the notion that Barack Obama is an anti-Semitic phony?

The article is filled with the sort of material that William S. Burroughs used to refer to as contradictory commands⊕. It includes all the correct denials, but uses a tone that leaves the theme hanging in the air. To wit:

Mr. Obama is Arab, Jack Stern's friends told him in Aventura. (He's not.)

He is a part of Chicago's large Palestinian community, suspects Mindy Chotiner of Delray. (Wrong again.)

Mr. Wright is the godfather of Mr. Obama's children, asserted Violet Darling in Boca Raton. (No, he's not.)

Al Qaeda is backing him, said Helena Lefkowicz of Fort Lauderdale (Incorrect.)

Michelle Obama has proven so hostile and argumentative that the campaign is keeping her silent, said Joyce Rozen of Pompano Beach. (Mrs. Obama campaigns frequently, drawing crowds in her own right.)

Mr. Obama might fill his administration with followers of Louis Farrakhan, worried Sherry Ziegler. (Extremely unlikely, given his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan.)

"Simply genius," says my friend. "Now let's wait for the Obama 'endorsement'."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Read a book, see a flick, eat too much, drink plenty vino, keep my nose clean, and generally laze about. Such is the simple life. So I almost forgot to remember.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit (once known as Danny the Red) put it this way the other day: Why not stop talking about May '68? All I am hearing is the prattle of the inept. That's a paraphrase by a friend.

What Cohn-Bendit, who is now a Green Party member of the European Union parliament, actually said, was: "Forget it: '68 is over -- buried under cobblestones ..." So shitcan the nostalgia: "It was nice for those who experienced it but it is over now."

Everyone knows the events of May 1968 changed everything, except that they didn't. Here's why:

In France, conservatism was so entrenched on both the left and the right that both missed the movement's meaning and could only fall back on stereotyped revolutionary interpretations. As for the anarchists, their utopia of widespread self-management -- tied to outdated historical references -- appeared entirely unsuitable. Starting from an initial rejection of political institutions and parliamentarism, we understood only later that the democratic challenge lies in occupying a politically "normalised" space.

Faced with the anarchists, with their confining minimalist political grammar -- reflected in the famous slogan elections, piege à cons (elections, a trap for idiots) -- and with the Communist Party, whose revolutionary ideal was eventually linked to totalitarian types of society, the future of May 1968 could only shift to the right with the election victory of General de Gaulle.

Which is not all that different from what happened in the States. The election of Richard M. Nixon comes to mind.

Nor is what Cohn-Bendit saying all that different from what Carl Oglesby says in his recently published memoir "Ravens in the Storm." It's about the 1960s anti-war movement, his involvement with the old Students for a Democratic Society, and his misadventures as the blue-collar, self-described "centrist" SDS president who was "star-chambered" for being an "incorrect liberal" unwilling to go along with the Weathermen.

They were young and angry and lived in a separate reality of their own. Many of them had been comfortably raised with a middle-class sense of entitlement, which they brought too easily to their politics. They believed that SDS was passé and that it was their right and their moral duty to take the step beyond nonviolence to terrorism. They were not personally violent. Even as terrorists, they confined themselves to symbolic targets and never killed anyone but three of their own, by accident.

But their vanity was boundless. They believed they were right simply because they were who they were. And after they had picked up a few deadly phrases from Marx, they went from knowing what was right to knowing what was "correct," as though politics were like arithmetic.

One day I'll have to read "Fugitive Days," Bill Ayers's memoir of the Weather Underground. Lazing about like this, I've got plenty of time. Its opening words sound promising: "Memory is a motherfucker."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Depending on who's talking, the cult of Frida Kahlo has either been amplified or demystified by the centennial touring show that started out in Minneapolis, is now in Philadelphia, and is soon heading to San Francisco.

I second Peter Schjeldahl ("The world will have cults, and who better merits one?"), as well as Holland Carter ("...Kahlo enters your system, fast, with a jolt..."). Both of them can't help gaping.

Neither can Sanford Schwartz. His remark is my favorite ("She is giving the world the finger ..."). He cites her own frequently quoted final words, written in her diary not long before she died, "I hope the exit is joyful -- and I hope never to come back."

I'm a late convert to the cult.

On a trip to Mexico City last October, I went to Kahlo's family home -- La Casa Azul in the city's Coyoacán suburb, where she was born and where she lived for much of her life and where she died. The place was crawling with diligent tourists like me.

More than a museum, it is a shrine to her memory. When I was there, the curators had mounted a touching exhibition of dozens of personal letters, photos, and artifacts. On display were some of the traditional Mexican dresses she famously wore. They had been tucked away in closets and were being exhibited for the first time. Many of the letters had also been secreted in the house, unseen for decades. Some, hidden behind a bathroom wall, were opened for the first time in 2004.

One in particular that struck me was a letter Kahlo wrote in 1939, defending her husband Diego Rivera against a complaint by Leon Trotsky, one of her former lovers. It is typewritten in English.

Dear Lev Davidovich: In your letter you say: 'Diego should never accept a bureaucratic position in the organisation because he never writes, never answers letters, never comes to meetings on time ...' So your conclusion is that he is a lousy 'secretary'. This position of yours I find rather unjust and childish. On several occasions in your house I observed that whenever there was a discussion of any kind, and Diego gave his opinion, you always took it with a certain irony and doubtfulness of its truthfulness. This kind of irony in time gets on one's nerves.

I'm now a bona fide Kahlo cultist. That's me in the tour-guide headphones, trying unsuccessfully to mimic the sad whimsy of a huge papier-mâché mask she made. It hangs on an exterior wall of the house adjacent to the garden, along with a handful of colorful papier-mâché skeletons strung up in a jolly kindergarten dance of death.

Not incidentally, the house where Trotsky was assassinated is only a few blocks away. That, too, was a revelation -- though of a different sort. Unlike La Casa Azul, it is grim and ugly. You can still see bullet holes in a bedrooom wall from an assassination attempt that failed. His hammer-and-sickle gravestone -- looking grand, in contrast to the house -- is an ironic reminder that everything he worked for is buried with him, swallowed by what he himself used to call "the dustbin of history."

Postscript: Notice Frida Kahlo with her hand on Diego Rivera's shoulder in this detail from Rivera's 1947 fresco "Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda," on exhibit at the Museo Mural Diego Rivera. The museum is located at the west end of the Alameda in Mexico City. (Click the photo.)