kagablog

1) “Exile is neither creative nor allegorical.” As I suggested at the conference, exile can be both creative and allegorical. For composers like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Rathaus, Hartmann, Weisse, just to name a few forced to leave their homelands, the experience also had positive aspects; new environments prompted reassessments, reinventions, creative reconsiderations, volcanic bursts of artistic activity. “At least none adequate to serve as a voice to suffering collectively borne.” No, Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” eloquently disproves your point.

2) “characterize anything short of mass political denationalizations like the Palestinian disaster is misleading and frivolous.” Re. the Palestinians, reality is always speckled and gray, never black and white. Let Said simultaneously speak out of both sides of his mouth, let him also address the “Disaster of the Arab Jews:” It is estimated that 800,000 to 1,000,000 Jews were either forced from their homes or left the Arab countries from 1948 until the early 1970s; 260,000 reached Israel between 1948–1951, and 600,000 by 1972. The Jews of Egypt and Libya were expelled while those of Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and North Africa left as a result of physical and political insecurity. Most were forced to abandon their property. By 2002, these Jews and their descendants constituted about 40% of Israel’s population. One of the main representative bodies of this group, the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, (WOJAC) estimates that Jewish property abandoned in Arab countries would be valued today at more than $300 billion and Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands at 100,000 square kilometers (four times the size of the state of Israel). For anyone interested in the “Catastrophe” of the Arab Jews, see: http://www.theforgottenrefugees.com/. Seeing the documentary footage of Arab pogroms against their fellow Jewish citizens is believing. Do not remain silent! I would revise jean-pierre’s sentence to read: “the cruel political punishment meted out to the Palestinians AND Arab Jews and others in their plight.” And, what about the million or so ethnic Germans who were thrown out of what is now Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic States, at the end of WW II? (Here I am not talking about those Germans who were settled by the Nazis on stolen property, but those who had lived in these lands for centuries, just like some Palestinians in what is now Israel.) Who today says that they should all go “home.” Would the Poles and Czechs take them back? Never! Truth is not one-sided or simple.

3) “Biblical exile- despite its extremely rich theology of covenants, morality for life among strangers and vast pretext for prophecies and condemnations was too identified with Zionist Nationalists to illuminate other stories of exile without prejudice.” “Go Down, Moses” was the national anthem of the oppressed Blacks in the US. There is a long and rich history of Jewish-Black civil rights struggle successfully employing the Biblical exile and Zionist narratives. Also, in South Africa, I believe that Jews played an important part in the anti-Apartheid movement (including Hartmann’s Jewish son-in-law, Goldstein). Consider just one now-famous incident in June 21, 1964, when three young civil rights workers—a 21-year-old black Mississippian, James Chaney, and two Jewish New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24—were murdered in Nashoba County, Mississippi. Goodman and Schwerner were both undergraduates at the then largely Jewish Queens College. The three students had been working to register black voters in Mississippi during “Freedom Summer” (again modeled on the Biblical narrative) and had gone to investigate the burning of a black church. They were arrested by the police on trumped-up charges, imprisoned for several hours, and then released after dark into the hands of Klan, who beat and murdered them. It was later proven in court that a conspiracy existed between members of Neshoba County’s law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan to kill them. See also, Bruce Feiler’s excellent study, America’s Prophet. Moses and the American Story, 2009.

4) “to rehabilitate his [Hartmann’s] political reputation.” No. I do not – did not – seek to “rehabilitate” him. I could have suppressed the information from his file in Austria. But since I consider myself a historian rather than a hagiographer, I presented the information. I did not attempt to sanitize him.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Jean-Pierre’s second “worse” scenario is true: “B) Friedrich Hartmann was a deeply sincere fascist. He joined the Austrofascist Fatherland’s Front because it was politically and institutionally dominant – dominant enough under Mussolini’s protection to actively persecute Nazis as well as communists in the Austrian opposition. When it became clear that Hitler was in the ascendant, Hartmann decided to switch allegiance to the Nazi party as more appropriate to his convictions. To achieve this he was prepared to abandon his wife and to persecute Jewish students. He sincerely wished for Nazi acceptance and was shocked when his former allegiance to the Vaterländische Front was, despite his sincere zeal , held against him and he was purged from his job. His fascist beliefs led him to chose South Africa as more promising frontier for his extreme rightist thinking, using his wife’s half Jewish status as a sweetener to his immigration bid he entered South Africa under the mask of political exile and joined over six hundred other fascist and Nazi diehards who were recruited by the sa nationalist government to man its upcoming state and academic takeover. When the South African government realized that it could achieve its white supremacist goals without retaining now unpopular neo Nazi ideologies , Hartmann found his role as fascist aesthetic and ideological exemplar undermined. Unable to endure the decline of explicit fascist thinking in the wily apartheid state- by then trying to construe itself as a democratic whites only republic- Hartmann went back to Austria where a strong neofascist movement had never declined and where he lived in hope of the return of the VF.”

Even if scenario B were mostly true, would – and should – this discount the revival of Hartmann’s music in South Africa or elsewhere?

Consider that Richard Strauss presided over grand larceny whereby, under his leadership of the Reichsmusikkammer 1933-35, Jewish and left-leaning composers in Germany were robbed of their professional existence and their savings, and their pensions were stolen. All this happened under Strauss’s watch while he himself raked in the equivalent of millions in today’s dollars. Should we still play Strauss’s music? Strauss hagiographers, both American and German, solve this problem simply by remaining silent about Strauss’s most serious crimes. As I have written elsewhere, “Looking through the biography and works list of a whole generation of famous and not-so-famous twentieth-century composers in the Grove Dictionary – and even the new MGG (not to mention the old MGG) – frequently does not tell the whole story regarding what they did – and did not – do during those infamous twelve years 1933-45. Consider one example as representative of many. In Franz Trenner’s Richard Strauss Werkverzeichnis published in 1985, one looks in vain under the entry for Feierlicher Einzug der Ritter des Johanniter-Ordens, o. op. 103, for any mention of the 1937 reworking as a piece for men’s chorus and large orchestra renamed Feierlich Anruf with a text by Rudolf G. Binding (1867-1938) and dedicated to Hitler, essentially a panegyric to him: “Grossen Volkes heiligen Rache – tief im Schlafe dumpf in Fron” (“The holy revenge of a great people, in deep sleep, lumbering in drudgery”). This arrangement, which for copyright reasons could never have been made without Strauss’s express permission, and even active collaboration, was premiered on April 18, 1934 in Berlin at a SS concert with Hitler and Goebbels in attendance. Surely, the existence of this version should not be concealed – but Trenner obviously felt that it was too embarrassing to include in the works list. Publications of Strauss’s letters have been edited in a similar spirit so as to omit Strauss’s offending Nazi circumlocutions and expressions; and thus, we still lack reliable, complete transcriptions of his original German letters, not to mention accurate English translations.”

Should we perform Sibelius, although he was a Nazi sympathesizer – I would go further and say collaborator – and also raked in millions of dollars and, most significantly, actively supported Goebbels’s propaganda campaign to win over the Nordic countries and Germans themselves to the Nazi cause? Should we play Bruckner, who was friends with some of the most right-wing and viciously anti-Semitic figures in the Vienna of his time? One of them even became his official biographer. Should we play Wagner, whose perverse “philosophy” simmers beneath the surface of his “total artworks.” To say “no” is to equate ethical with artistic values. Despite the long Western tradition stemming back to Antiquity that artists should be virtuous, the connection is untenable. Thus, Hartmann can be a great artist and a flawed human being and political figure. A great work of art can be – and most often is – shot-through with false ideologies – religious and political. A “holier-than-thou” attitude is impractical. For inescapable historical and artistic reasons, South Africa owns Hartmann, and Hartmann South Africa.

5) “It is likely that this evaluation exceeds the capacity and expertise of any one scholar. Judgment beyond musicology is required to understand the migrations between the VF and the Nazi party- the kind of judgment possessed by general historians of the era such as Michael Kater and his colleagues. The relation of Hartmann to fascist recruits into South African administration and universities needs to be investigated by historians of apartheid structures and of the fascist diaspora.” Well, to this point, at last, I agree! But, it may well turn out that Hartmann never “chose” to come to South Africa at all. The sources indicate a sustained attempt to emigrate to America, which faltered, and South Africa was the only country willing to offer him a job and a chance to save himself and his family in time. I am sorry to disappoint, but I strongly suspect that politics had little if nothing to do with Hartmann being hired by Smeath-Jones: Rhodes needed someone with great musical expertise whom they found in Hartmann and Hartmann needed to get out of Austria immediately.

“If B turns out to be well supported then South Africa has unwittingly hosted the celebration of a fascist, an apartheid zealot and an unrepentant opportunist.” Oh dear! Please don’t worry too much! In Hartmann’s case, apparently his only daughter and son-in-law (both scientists) were forced into exile in England because of their anti-Apartheid stance. While the father may not have had exactly the same principled ideology as the daughter, fathers do tend to influence daughters – and Hartmann apparently was proud of his daughter. All of these considerations, and other factors, suggest “scenario B” to be highly unlikely. My sense of Hartmann’s biography is that such alarm is unwarranted. But if you really want to worry – and also protect the South African public from exposure to amoral composers like Hartmann – then please don’t forget to agonize about Sibelius, Strauss, Wagner, Bruckner, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Bach, just to name a few unsavory individuals.

With all best wishes,

Tim Jackson