Denis Fodor wrote:

>What I'm driving at is not a whitewash of nazisantes German composers.
>It's simply a reminder that these individuals not implausibly thought
>they had a case, a case scarcely naif, for the way they chose to conduct
>their lives.  They determined to incarnate the decision to exercise their
>right and to continue to live in a country they considered irrevocably
>their own and in which it was their birthright to live.  A good many
>non-nazi politicians played it that way, too, and among these numbered
>such realists, not naives, as Konrad Adenauer and Kurt Schumacher.

The main difference between Furtwangler & Strauss and Adenauer &
Schumacher is that Furtwangler & Strauss agreed (for whatever reasons)
to act as representatives of the regime and thus lived in safety and
wealth whereas Adenauer & Schumacher were opposed to the regime and paid
bitterly for it: Adenauer was imprisoned in the Gestapo prison Brauweiler
and Schumacher in the concentration camps Heuberg, Kuhberg, Dachau,
Flossenburg and Neuengamme.  He was severely tortured.  I agree that
there is not the one and only right way to react to a dictatorial regime.
But if you shake dirty hands you get stained.

Robert