Ruben Stam <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>My admittedly hazy memory had one of the SS soldiers play the Bach,

That's how I remember it too.

>but I agree that it's a very powerful scene.  It reminded me of a remark
>philosopher George Steiner once made during an interview in his home in
>Cambridge (UK).  He said something like: "One thing I have never been able
>to explain is how the Kommandant of a concentration camp could go home in
>the evening after a grizly day's doing, sit down behind the piano with his
>wife and children around him an play a Schubert impromptu.  And to say he
>played it badly would be a lie.  He would play it so movingly that tears
>would spring to your eyes."

But what was just as interesting was the other soldier, who couldn't tell
whether it was Bach or Mozart.  (Not exactly rocket science, one would
think.) It drove home the notion that many Germans literally grew up with
this cultural legacy surrounding them and yet may never have given it any
conscious thought one way or the other.  With that level of unawareness,
would it be any surprise that the lofty messages we perceive as conveyed
by these great creators failed to reach them? I thought that spoke volumes
about a society's potential to miss the true value of its own artistic
culture, which is perhaps the flip side of excessive valuation of its own
art to the exclusion of other human sensibilities.

 - seb