Thursday 13 January 2011

Being there


A few days before Christmas the BBC broadcast Taking Sides, a movie based on a play of the same name by Ronald Harwood. Directed by István Szabó, it’s based on the post-war interrogation of Wilhelm Furtwängler, best known as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, part of the denazification process instituted by the Allies in the wake of their victory over the Third Reich.

Furtwängler himself is played by Stellan Skarsgård, with Harvey Keitel taking on the role of Major Steve Arnold, his US Army inquisitor. In the minor key it’s about the clash between two contrasting personalities; in the major it explores the relationship between art and politics or, better said, the artist and politics. It’s also about taking sides.

It made me take sides, but not quite in the way that I expected. Szabó has previously explored the relationship between artistic integrity and moral corruption in Mephisto, a clever movie full of subtle ambiguity. I found Taking Sides to be neither subtle nor ambiguous. Whether it was the director’s intention or not, my sympathies were all with Furtwängler, a controlled performance by Skarsgård, confronted by an interrogator who turned out to be a spiteful and petty-minded philistine.

There is a message here, certainly, though I can’t be quite sure what the message was. At one point it even appeared to suggest that the art itself was corrupt, that the high culture of Beethoven and Schubert was evidence of corruption, listened to in docile silence by the Germans, cut and contrasted with American army personnel jitterbugging to a band performing Route 66.

Furtwängler essentially stood condemned by one thing: he stayed when so many others left. Not only did he stay in 33 but he became one of the prize trophies of the Nazi Regime, Hitler’s favourite ‘band leader’, as Major Arnold puts it, a monolith in what had been turned into a cultural desert. Many of those who did leave, particularly Thomas Mann, never forgave the conductor for his ‘apostasy’. Furtwängler’s defence, one that he offers to Arnold, was that he believed it possible to separate art from politics and – just as important – he could not abandon his country in the midst of spiritual darkness.

He was naïve, yes, but was he culpable? After all, he did not have the perfect knowledge of 1945, the knowledge of men like Arnold, whose self-righteous indignation is given added fire by footage of bodies being bulldozed into burial pits at Belsen Concentration Camp. Arnold, who previously announced that “I’m gonna get that fucking bandleader”, proceeds to try to pin him down as an active Nazi collaborator, though all the evidence is to the contrary: he may have performed for the regime but he kept his distance, never joining the Party, never giving the Hitler salute, helping Jewish musicians as he was able.

There is a germ of a first class idea here, effectively ruined by Keitel’s bombastic performance. I have no idea if this is a true representation of the real Major Arnold, but in the movie he’s depicted as a loud-mouthed bully, one whose petty humiliations of Furtwängler, looking ever more vulnerable, even alienates his assistant, a young Jewish lieutenant, and his German typist, herself a victim of the regime. Keitel’s Major Arnold, no matter how well-intentioned his motives, no matter how justified he is in his contempt for the morally blind, is no more than a self-important and abusive little philistine. He is no more, to put it another way, than a Nazi.

Although Furtwängler was finally exonerated of all ‘charges’ against him by a later denazification trial the movie ends with a voice-over by Arnold, saying that he had ‘winged’ him and that he was never allowed to conduct in the United States. But then, over the closing credits, footage of the real Furtwängler is shown, performing to an audience which includes Joseph Goebbels. At the conclusion the Propaganda Minister shakes his hand. The conductor is then shown surreptitiously wiping that same hand with a cloth.

I think I should finish with the testimony that he himself gave when he was examined by a German court, words I imagine beyond the comprehension of Major Arnold and all who walk in his shadow;

I knew Germany was in a terrible crisis; I felt responsible for German music, and it was my task to survive this crisis, as much as I could. The concern that my art was misused for propaganda had to yield to the greater concern that German music be preserved, that music be given to the German people by its own musicians. These people, the compatriots of Bach and Beethoven, of Mozart and Schubert, still had to go on living under the control of a regime obsessed with total war. No one who did not live here himself in those days can possibly judge what it was like.

Does Thomas Mann really believe that in 'the Germany of Himmler' one should not be permitted to play Beethoven? Could he not realize that people never needed more, never yearned more to hear Beethoven and his message of freedom and human love, than precisely these Germans, who had to live under Himmler’s terror? I do not regret having stayed with them.


68 comments:

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  7. The prosecutors in this case were American not British, Adam, since the conductor lived in their zone of occupation.

    The Germans are not gods,they are just people, even the greatest of them, though Hitler led them to believe otherwise. I have no time for 'master races.'

    I love the English-language, its cadence, its poetry, its beautiful limpid quality that has allowed so many great things to be said with clarity and precision. I'm sure there must be some awful place in the world that you can go to where you will never hear the English language for as long as you live.

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  13. Adam, yes, but it’s best to avoid these kind of extreme dichotomies, especially in view of the subject under discussion, which is not just music. To say that my country is ‘damned’ because, in your estimation, people do not have a proper appreciation of music is absurdly over the top. I certainly don’t have your technical expertise but I have no idea what leads you to conclude that I have no love of music. Are we a nation of philistines? I don’t know. I don’t associate with philistines and I don’t generalise. I don’t think I’m being defensive. You were the one who wrote that you no longer wished to hear English. I merely expressed my love for the language.

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  15. What tautology? I can certainly speak English, as can all of the people I know. The subject is a movie, my review of a movie, and the moral issues it raises about the relationship between politics and art.

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  17. I don't accept the validity of collective guilt, nor of collective honour. People are individually responsible for their actions and inactions. This is the essence of my argument against the tyranny of statism.

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  18. @ MGON:Your punishment is Islam and Churchill was a foul fat man.

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  20. My God what a nationalist diatribe some of your comments constitute, especially considering you know me and my politics.

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  22. The philistines would not have needed to subject the artists of the USSR to a 'vengeful political agenda'; the Soviets managed this very well themselves without any external aid, in a far, far more vicious fashion than was ever achieved by the likes of Major Arnold. To survive was a bonus. I attended a performance of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in the Little Bolshoi when I was in Moscow. The programme notes published in full the infamous 1936 attack in Pravda, thought to be by Stalin himself, who ostentatiously walked out in the midst of a performance.

    I would have thought my view on the treatment of Furtwängler was blindingly obvious from the content of my review. I would have argued in the same terms if an artist or a writer had been treated in the same hectoring fashion rather than a musician, when the only guilt was to have refused to go into exile. But I do not for a moment accept that an artist, no matter how great, is beyond the standards of normal moral judgements, that art somehow excuses crime. I does not.

    I rather think you are the one for diatribes, Adam, not I. I merely said that there are no philistines in my circle and I expressed my love for the English language as a counterpoint to your desire never to hear it again. I see you are acquainted with 'most people in this country.' I am not, only a small fraction. The fact that you know that so many people in so many other countries could name six composers is quite an achievement, well beyond me.

    Your politics, the way you talk this county, my country, down, is beginning to disgust me; your self-righteous conceit is beginning to disgust me, your inability to grasp simple points of argument and your tendency to fly to laughable extremes is beginning to disgust me. I wish you no fate worse than a strong dose of sobriety, balance and common sense. Otherwise do feel at liberty to go to some other place in the world where English and Anglo-saxon attitudes are a rarity; places like Serbia or, say, Indonesia. It gives me no pleasure to write this, a measure of my anger.

    I know I shall be annoyed with myself later for being compromised in this way, for expressing myself in such blunt and frank terms, especially as you have made a sustained and welcome contribution to this blog over many months.

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  29. Adam, read over your own words and answer your own questions. One cannot revive a corpse.

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  30. Adam, dude, you need to get out more . . . see some sunshine. Try Tunisia.

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  33. Adam, you missed this country is damned and a wasteland. I think it best if we both take time out. Sorry for the vulgarism. :-)

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  42. it is a movie from 2001, i did not know about it, so many movies and little time to see them all, i like War World II, I like history, i am interested in the character of teh movie, nazism is a interesting theme to know, all that evil spirit and terrible actions make you ask questions that you want answered using all the information possible, understand the actitude of that people around 1939 -1945. If i have luck i will see this movie. Thank you for the article, Ana. A hug. Mario.

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  43. I'm caught in a cleft stick by your review - it's a film I haven't yet seen. On the one hand, I can feel some sympathy for the artist, and one the other hand, I wonder at his lack of resistance.

    My grandfather wasn't an artist - he was a manufacturer of ladies' underwear in Vienna at the the time of the Anschluss. Immediately after this "Blumenkrieg", he sent his wife to England. And his daughter, my mother, followed many months later on a Kindertransport.

    My grandfather stayed in Austria for only one reason - to fight. He was arrested, escaped, arrested again, recaptured, and summarily shot to death.

    I wonder if the descendants of Wilhelm Furtwängler have more or less esteem than I for my grandfather.

    :-)

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  45. Adam, first of all I owe you an apology, not for the substance of what I wrote this morning, but for the tone. I was angry at some of your remarks, and your apparent lack of comprehension, but I should have stood back and waited until that mood had passed. I do not like my feelings getting the better of a proper sense of detachment.

    You have a singular view of life and politics, a view, I suspect, shared by few others. It is not my view, it could never be my view, but it is refreshingly different. Yes, there is a lot wrong with this country, and yes, so much could be improved; on that much we can agree. What I cannot accept is your growing tendency to disparage this nation, to see virtue everywhere else but here, an argument advanced by that other person to whom you allude. A wasteland is a wasteland and the damned are the damned; there is no prospect for resurrection or reform there.

    I have never ‘talked down’ the Empire – dead and gone – in the way that you consistently ‘talk down’ this nation, not just here but in other posts I have made. The Empire is part of our history, dead and buried, beyond all resurrection, although in a blog last year I specifically argued that its legacy was not all bad. But I’m a historian; I view things objectively, or try to. You have a much more impassioned view. Sometimes I find it difficult to know exactly where you are coming from, or what exactly you mean. Your expressed desire never to hear English spoken again is a case in point, rather bizarre, considering that English, the global spread of English, is perhaps the Empire’s most enduring legacy.

    Finally, I wasn’t ‘running away from debate’. I did want to stand back, that’s true, but I have other pressures on my time, other places to be, other things to do. I want to repeat that I value your contributions, value most of the things you have to say, even in the midst of the deepest disagreement. I just wish that sometimes that you would reflect a little deeper before you write. Your point about art in the USSR, made, I imagine, in a rush of emotion, opened you up to an obvious counter-attack.

    Adam, 1911 is a hundred years ago; 2011 is now, and this is my life, this is my world. You have such an unrealistic and rosy view of the past. If you think things were better in 1911 I would urge you to read The Strange Death of Liberal England. The point is that there has never been a perfect time and there has never been a perfect place. But if we are to find a way beyond our present difficulties we must look to the future, not to a mythical arcadia.

    I would never want to hang you, harm you or condemn you in any way.

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  46. Mario, I saw it on BBC iPlayer back in December. It's probably gone now but do check. Otherwise you might find it on sites like Project Free TV.

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  47. CI, your grandfather was clearly a very brave man. God grant that he rest in peace.

    I honestly can’t say how I would have behaved in similar circumstances; with nobility, I hope, with apprehension, I suspect. Some people, like your grandfather, had no choice but to resist, and resist to the maximum, the alternative being to walk quietly into oblivion. For so many others the choice was less stark. Most people then and now live sub-political lives, concerned only by immediate things, like family and friends. Resistance is not something that they would ever consider, even if they are compromised by silence, as silence implies consent.

    There are, however, degrees of resistance; the maximum degree, the course taken by your grandfather, decreasing to a minimum. Furtwängler was clearly at the lower end of the scale, but he did take personal risks, assisting Jewish musicians being an important case.

    Yes, he could have done more. Even if he did not want to leave Germany he could, like some others, have gone into a self-imposed ‘internal exile.’ He did not and perhaps it is right to condemn him for offering spiritual sustenance to the regime. But should he have been singled out, should he have been bullied and humiliated in the way this movie depicts? Should he, in other words, have been subject to a form of special treatment simply because of who he was? Personally I think not. I might condemn Shostakovich for his abjectness and cowardice in face of an equal evil, but what’s the point? There are simply no easy answers.

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  50. Ana,
    My son went to St Anton in his gap year, when he was a chalet maid at Tirolerhaus, Nassereiner Strasse 27. It was he who drove the runaway snow truck. His name is legend.

    My mother refused every opportunity to revisit Austria. Yet I worked twice in Germany, and my mother wished me nothing but well.

    Gosh, there are no easy answers; not for a generation or two, or maybe three...

    :-)

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  53. I'm not telling people by the way that we are 'better than they are', it's all subjective and frankly when it comes to living standards, most countries in the European sphere, especially in Central and Western Europe have a rather similar living standards; thus making this remark all the more subjective and certainly not jingoistic. There might be some who enjoy life in Iran more than they'd enjoy Britain; I wish them nothing but peace as I wish most people in this world peace. For me though, all I want is a return to the Britain of 1900.

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  61. And about the English language remark, I said 'sometimes' I wish...not that I emphatically wish. This is the key. Sometimes one can learn as much from someone who speaks scarcely a word of one's language than from a great orator. Sometimes there is more wisdom in a few words of desperately broken English than in the arrogant pronouncements of the pomposity one oft encounters. One needs both; one needs all. Hence the word sometimes is a key element of what I have said.

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  63. Adam, thank you. I will read the Powell Speeches, now in my collection, but it will take time, given the sheer weight of my extramural demands (I’ve still not managed to finish watching the Hancock DVDs!).

    I don’t believe for a moment that Furtwängler would have agreed with you. The final part of his statement makes it quite clear that he believed that he had a duty to the people amongst whom he lived and performed. The movie makes it clear that there is a human duty beyond art.

    Yes, the best is probably behind us, for history moves in inevitable cycles of dawn and dusk, but the nation still has a future beyond regrets for a vanished glory, beyond the fate of Nineveh and Tyre. Germany was fortunate in defeat just as we were, it might be argued, unfortunate in victory, bankrupt and no longer able to sustain an imperial legacy, let alone the wasteful welfare programmes you approve of. What was it foreigners used to say? That Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role. For Macmillan and Heath the new role, the new ‘empire’, it might even be said, was Europe.

    I hope I do not offend you in saying that you’re an idealist and a dreamer. For where would we be without dreamers?

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  64. CI, I'm sure he had a great time. St Anton is a lovely place and the Austrians are lovely people, despite a dark past.

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  66. You will get no argument from me about Heath. :-)

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