Satoshi Akima <[log in to unmask]>  writes:

>Yet in those darkest final hour in the doomed Berlin bunker, Hitler
>enacted a suicide staged like the death in the closing scene out of
>'Goetterdaemmerung', with his new bride next to him. ..I can imagine
>no more fitting music than the closing scene of 'Goetterdaemmerung'
>for that historical Schlusszene, closing curtain.

At one pm of the fateful day Adolf Hitler had his last meal down in the
bunker in the company of his two secretaries, another female factotum, and
an SS corporal from his personal staff.  They had spaghetti and a tossed
salad.  At three pm the Fuehrer helped his wife commit suicide and then
shot himself in the head while swallowing a poison pill.  Sometime after
four, three SS men carried Hitler and his wife aloft and deposited their
bodies in a shallow trench, poured gasoline on them and in three tries,
because of a brisk wind, finally succeeded in ignting the bodies.  Sometime
after that from an enlisted men's canteen, about 200 yards distant, the
public address system started blaring out popular music.  One witness
reported that the number that remained glued in his memory was called Es
geht alles vorueber, es geht alles vorbei.

I suppose Peter Sellars, or one of his likes, could make a
Goetterdaemmerung of this material.  Or maybe the Ride of the Valkyries.
Why that? Oh, because it seems that Eva Braun, aka Frau Hitler, in the
rigor mortis of death had jackknifed into what morticians call an
"equestrian posture"-- sitting upright,as if riiding in a saddle.

(Research from a book by my late colleague, James P.  O'Donnell, The
Bunker).

Denis Fodor