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From:
Denis Fodor <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 23 Jan 2005 22:57:29 +0200
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Robert Peters continues to insist that Strauss, Orff, and Furtwaengler
should have emigrated:

>...if you chose to stay in German you inevitably got involved in the
>deeds of this horrible regime.  And Strauss chose to stay.  Now why
>should I defend him?...  there were camps from day one.  There were
>imprisonment and torture from day one.  It took a politically naive
>or ignorant guy (like Strauss) not to notice all this....

Robert Peters's position is politically correct in the Germany of
today.  But viewed from the situation in the Germany of the thirties it
becomes questionable.  In a great part of Europe in the period between
1918 and 1939, dictatorial or authoritarian regimes became the rule that
obtained-- in Russia, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Rumania,Poland,
Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria, Yugoslavia, Slovakia, and maybe
I've forgotten one or two others.  "Camps" were commonplace in these
countries and, in quite a few, minorities were persecuted under the
"law".  In Poland, for example, between the years 1936-1939 there were
150 pogroms.  Hundreds of Jews were murdered and even more hundreds
injured.  Gypsies were persecuted interminably and at will in most of
eastern Europe.  Rumania and Hungary enacted anti-Jewish race laws about
the same time as Germany.Proportionate to population more of the mentally
ill were final-solutioned in Norway than in Germany.  Moreover, in
Strauss-Orff-Furtwaengler's part of Germany, Bavaria, there had obtained
for a short time an ultra-leftist regime which underscored for, and
embedded in, this part of Germany the fear of its perpetuation and spread.
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.  Now,
it should be conceded that, after 1939, nazism took a violent turn to
exceptionalism--its style as of then could no longer be seen as typical
of Europe-- which, alas, the adamant non-nazi Germans then had to sweat
out.

Denis Fodor

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