Dave Lampson forwarded:

>May 6, 2000
>Music at Site of Nazi Camp Ignites Protest
>By ROGER COHEN ...
>
>"The survivors see this place as a de facto graveyard," he said.
>"And in graveyards such events are not held."

(*men*)

One the one hand, there were 6 million non-jews killed in the Holocaust
as well as 6 million jews.  these people also have needs to grieve and
reconcile, as much as any other people.

(*de*)
There must still be a recognition that the jewish peoples of Europe bore
the brunt of Nazi hatred, and that there are those misguided individuals
who have a peverse attraction to the regime that perpetrated them.

Hence a need to be more careful in ones choice of actions.  While
beethoven's 9th symphony is indeed an ode to joy, and the piece symbolic
with liberation - it was the American president Lincoln who noted about
Gettysburg - "In a larger sense, we cannot concecrate, we cannot hallow,
this ground.  Those who have fought and died here have done so far beyond
our poor power to add or subtract." In one sense the camp could be
liberated, and it is right and proper to note this, but in a larger sense,
it cannot ever be liberated.

If one wished to play a concert in such a place, the work that should be
chosen should be one which is, expressly or implicitly, a work for such
a setting, which does not end with joy - but merely ends.  Works such as
Mahler's 5th or 9th Symphonies, Britten's War Requiem, Petterson's 7th all
recomend themselves.

Mahler would be the best selection, for the added reason that it would
deprive those misguided individuals who would grasp at such an event as
a symbol of *Aryanism*, and remind people that the *German* artistic
and social world is indelibly intertwined with the contrivutions of its
*Jewish* inhabitants.  Much, by analogy, as the American artistic and
social world is indelibly intertwined with the contributions of its
African-American inhabitants.

Stirling Newberry
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