In the crepuscular light of a bitterly cold evening in the heart of Poland, Maxim Vengerov, one of the world’s most accomplished musicians, is being put through his paces by a television crew. He has to walk slowly down a gloomy corridor, playing his violin in accompaniment to a playback of his own recording of Bach’s Chaconne. It looks note perfect on the small monitor; but as soon as he gets to the end of the corridor, the director asks him to do it all over again. There are different shots to get: the fingers, the feet, the movement of the bow. Each one needs a new walk. The director is scrupulously polite, and Vengerov uncomplaining. There is no air of fatigue, nor the impatience that routinely bedevils even the serenest of film sets. A sense of higher purpose is in the air.
If Vengerov is finding the experience emotionally draining, he hides it with exemplary professionalism. The piece is difficult; but then he is a great violinist. The repetition of the walk must be tedious; but so is practising for eight hours a day. But he could be forgiven for finding it unusually challenging to play his instrument in what must be the most forbidding venue he has ever experienced in his stellar career: the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The corridor with which he is getting acquainted is in the camp’s former infirmary, or Krankenbau, the notorious “Ka-Be”, as it was to be immortalised in Primo Levi’s account of his incarceration at Auschwitz, If This is a Man. This particular block is not normally open to the public, but it hasn’t been neglected and appears in good condition. The eccentric design on the walls, a playful, abstract pattern composed of primary school squiggles and pastel colours, is original and intact.
More shocking than the infantile decoration is the fact that the corridor was decorated at all. This was, needless to say, not a hospital in the orthodox sense of the word: downstairs, prisoners who were judged too ill to be worth saving were given fatal injections in the heart. Before the gas chambers and the mass exterminations, Ka-Be helped pioneer the first clinically controlled murders of camp prisoners, which gives the building a rare and vile distinction.
But for the moment, it is full of the beautiful music of Bach. The incongruity is lost on no one. But it is the very point of this project. Vengerov’s piece is part of a BBC programme, to be screened next Saturday, which brings together musicians from all over the world to play in Auschwitz as part of the commemoration of the camp’s liberation by Soviet troops 60 years ago.
The other participants, and the pieces they play, have been carefully chosen to form, in the words of executive producer Peter Maniura, a “layered narrative, through music” of the barbaric events that made this Polish village a synonym for western civilisation’s blackest moment. There are, among others, the pianist Emmanuel Ax, playing Chopin’s waltzes and mazurkas, a reference to a happier life in Poland before the war; the Smith Quartet tackling Steve Reich’s harrowing piece “Different Trains”; the soprano Iva Bittova singing “Auschwitz Lied”, a Gypsy lament composed in the camp; and a new commission by the American composer Osvaldo Golijov.
It is the first time a recording of this type has been permitted in Auschwitz. The authorities who run the museum are scrupulous in their refusal to allow the camp to become a sentimental theme-park, carefully preserving the air of dignified quietude which seems the only appropriate response to the wartime horrors. But this, explains curator Mirek Obstarczyk, is an exception. “It is a very beautiful idea,” he says during a break in the filming. “It is respectful. When Iva [Bittova] sang her song the other day, it was snowing, and very, very cold, and she started crying - there was a mood here that there has never been before.”
Maniura admits he approached the camp authorities “with an enormous sense of foreboding”, but felt reassured by initial responses which backed the idea. The production is shared by television companies in Poland, Germany and Canada. There was American interest too, says Maniura, but the subject was deemed “too controversial”. Potential participants too were positive, although some, such as the violinist Pinchas Zuckerman, found the prospect too difficult to countenance. “Both of his parents died in camps. He told me we were doing the right thing, but that he just couldn’t be there to do it,” says Maniura.
It seems, on this cold evening in Ka-Be, that there is more than the making of a television programme in question; there is a philosophical principle at stake. Sixty years on, what is the most appropriate way of remembering the Nazi Holocaust? Many have argued in the strongest possible terms that the only possible cultural riposte to such barbarity is to say nothing. The secret of Auschwitz’s truth, says the Jewish scholar Elie Wiesel, “lies in silence”. Theodor Adorno famously urged that there could be no lyric poetry - and by extension any art that sought to transcend time and place - after Auschwitz. To challenge such unimaginable facts with art, runs the argument, is sheer conceit.
But perhaps the period for respectful silence is over. Perhaps to refill the corridors of these monotonous prison blocks with sublime music is itself an affirmation of the human spirit that today feels more defiant, and more effective, than muteness. After filming, I ask Vengerov for his views on the matter. It is his first ever visit to the camp, but he looks remarkably unfazed by the experience, and is positively evangelical about his role here.
The music of Bach, he says, “is so pure and clear, and contains such an incredible range of emotions, it is like coming out of a dark tunnel and seeing the light”. He says he feels extremely honoured to be able to make music in this “very complex place. Music has always been a symbol of peace, and sends out a positive message. It is a universal language that everyone speaks. It does not need translation.” All well and good, I say, but I ask him about the German officers who cried to Schubert in the evening before sending children to the gas chambers the following morning. Did they not love music too? Vengerov takes the question in his stride. “All humans have two sides: a dark side and a beautiful side. It was a tragic misinterpretation. It is as simple as that.”
I am introduced to August Kowalczyk, not only a survivor from Auschwitz, but one of the very few prisoners who managed to escape from the camp. Today, a robust and good-humoured octogenarian, he acts as a consultant for the museum. He remembers well how the guards established a prisoners’ orchestra, and recalls the marches played every day at four in the morning “to make it easier to count” the prisoners as they left the camp for work.
I ask him what the effect was of listening to music, some of it jaunty, some of it beautiful, in such hideous circumstances. “It was terrible of course. Sometimes at the end of the day we had to carry dead bodies back into the camp, and still the orchestra played. But it was terrible for the musicians too. They didn’t have any choice in the matter.” The bodies were piled up in a corner of the block opposite the orchestra, even while it played.
Kowalczyk remembers one Sunday, when the orchestra was asked by the SS officers to play requests in a specially arranged outdoor concert, not far from one of the crematoriums. “The prisoners working on the other side of the fence could hear it too. For some of them, it was like a sentimental return home. But others were very angry. They hated it. They thought this was no place for music.”
And today? He says he too had his doubts about the BBC project. “But I saw that it was an exceptional case. It is another form of tribute. People who come to the museum pay tribute to the victims in different ways, with prayers, with flowers. This is with music.” He quotes Adorno’s maxim about there no longer being a case for poetry after Auschwitz. “But there is,” he insists. “It is just a very different poetry.”
He says it is important to respect the variety of ways that people react in the camp. “I was very interested to see, one day, a native American arrive in the camp, in his traditional dress. And he began to sing, alone, in front of the wall of execution. It left an incredible impression on me. You cannot say there is only one way to commemorate.”
After the war, Kowalczyk was to become a well-known actor, scriptwriter and theatre director based in Warsaw. One of the first parts offered to him was to play an SS officer. He accepted with alacrity. “I wanted to express how I remembered [the officers]. How they appeared in the eyes of the prisoners.” How had he managed it? “With great professionalism,” he replies with a glint in his eye.
While agreeing that neither words nor music can really convey what happened in Auschwitz, he says it is still important to try. “As a tribute to all those dead people. To the whole of human civilisation. We have to treat this as a delicate, special site.” But not, he insists, as a silent one. Kowalczyk believes in leaving a mark. As we finish talking, he leans across to scribble in my notebook, not his name, but his camp number: 6804.
In his book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, the author Frederic Spotts argues that of all the arts, music was the one which aroused Hitler’s deepest anxiety during his rise to power. In his speeches during the 1920s, he spoke over and over of cultural decline, with the state of contemporary music uppermost in his mind. Weimar had been desecrated by the “cultural poisoners of the German people” with their “nigger jazz” - possibly a reference to the popular jazz opera by Ernst Krenek, Jonny spielt auf. In a speech in 1928, Hitler affirmed his preference for “a single German military march to all the garbage of a modernist composer. The one is music, the other is no better than vomit. It is up to us to get rid of this muck”.
At one and the same time, Hitler and his assiduous followers declared war on atonality, dissonance, social chaos, Bolshevism, internationalism and Jews. Musical events that strayed from 19th century convention were denounced, and banned. Expressionist productions of Tannhauser and Der fliegende Hollander were cancelled within days of Hitler’s rise to power. Works by progressive composers - Kurt Weill, Berthold Goldschmidt, Hanns Eisler, Franz Schreker, Alexander Zemlinsky - were condemned as “untragbar” (unacceptable) and halted within weeks.
This came as a considerable shock to all those who believed that Germany’s relationship with music was unique. The most cultured of nations saw itself as a guardian of the highest of the arts; and musical life in the post-first world war years, as social commentary and experimentation replaced the old Romantic order, had been full of creativity and new ideas.
Hitler himself was aware of the legacy he was helping to undermine: he devoted part of a Nuremberg rally in 1937 to criticism of an over-zealous party official who had declared the masonic theme of Die Zauberflote ideologically unacceptable. “Only a person lacking respect for his own nationality would condemn Mozart’s Zauberflote because its text may be ideologically opposed to his own outlook,” he reprimanded. Hitler also condemned as “grotesque” the “Aryanisation” of operatic texts such as Carmen and Tosca. Tellingly, he declined to visit the Degenerate Music Exhibition organised by Hans Severus Ziegler in Dusseldorf in 1938 to expose the “triumph of arrogant Jewish impudence”.
Then there was Hitler’s well-documented love of Wagner, who held a special place in Nazi mythology. Without wishing here to rehearse all the arguments over Wagner’s alleged anti-Semitism, there was certainly a bond, in Hitler’s head at least, between the composer’s bombastic music and the political triumph of Nazism. It is surely significant that after the German army’s defeat at Stalingrad, according to his aides, Hitler could no longer bear to listen to Wagner’s operas, preferring the lightweight distraction of Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow.
Music, even in the Nazi years, remained ingrained in the German psyche. Although at the highest level, the battle against modernism and associated “degenerate” forms of music continued to rage, it was at the ground level of day-to-day activity that this affinity between nation and art form was most evident. Most chillingly, the setting up of the first concentration camps in the 1930s illustrated a terrible truth: that for many Nazi soldiers, there was no problem reconciling the continued enjoyment of their beloved musical pieces with the appalling treatment of their prisoners.
At the Cite de la Musique in Paris, a recent exhibition, Le IIIe Reich et la Musique, shed light on this very issue. It showed original sheet music of songs composed inside the camps, as well as video footage of performances attended by inmates in the “show camp” of Theresienstadt. It also focused on remarkable testimonies by former prisoners: one detainee at Buchenwald who remembers the local Sturmbannfuhrer ordering the singing of opera arias during the torture of miscreant prisoners; another victim at Mauthausen, Joseph Drexel, recalling how he was himself forced to sing the song “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (”O head covered with blood and wounds”) while being tortured, until he lost consciousness.
This, according to Eckhard John, a musicologist at the Deutsches Volksliedarchiv, was music used as a form of ritual humiliation of prisoners. But there were yet more sinister levels of musical activity in the camps to come. With the ever greater numbers of prisoners confined to camps came the development of “camp hymns” - the most famous was that of Buchenwald, composed in 1938 - and even competitions organised by the SS between rival camps. Underground hymns, painting a more realistic picture of life in the camps, were also composed: Karel Svenk’s “Theresienstadter Marsch”, and “Arbeit Macht Frei” from Dachau were the most notable examples.
It was a short step to the most controversial musical development to take place in Nazi Germany during the war: the establishment of concentration camp orchestras. At Theresienstadt, these were cynically set up so that the Nazis could show the world that, even though Jews were imprisoned inside a camp, civilised values continued to flourish. The camp was proudly exhibited by the Nazis to the International Red Cross Committee in 1944, and was the subject of a propaganda film later that year, in which prisoners were shown, clustered around tables embellished with bouquets of flowers, enjoying concerts of classical music.
A host of prominent Jewish musicians - Gideon Klein, Edith Steiner-Kraus, Alice Herz-Sommer, Juliette Arany - passed through Theresienstadt, as well as the composer Viktor Ullmann, who wrote his opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis there in 1943. Nearly all of them were sent to Auschwitz, and died there. In reality, Theresienstadt was little more than an ante-chamber, a mocking prologue preceding execution.
At Auschwitz itself came the most brutal exploitation of music of all, with the assembly of orchestras to accompany the daily exit from and entry into the camp of the workers, and, some say, even the notorious selections that condemned thousands of Jews to pass straight into the gas chambers on arrival at the camp.
The last fact is the subject of much dispute among survivors. Eckhard John quotes the testimony of Esther Bejarano, a member of the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz-Birkenau, who remembers playing while Jews stepped off the trains, straight into the selection process. “They saluted us joyously, thinking that where there was music, things couldn’t be so bad,” she recalled in a 1989 interview. “That was part of the tactics of the SS.” Other witnesses strenuously deny this ultimate ignominy.
The orchestras were also used to play for German officers’ pleasure. Another survivor from the women’s orchestra, Fania Fenelon, recalled in her own book how the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, “wept when we played Schumann for him. Kramer gassed 24,000 people. When he was tired from working, he used to come to us to listen to some music. That is what was incomprehensible about the Nazis, they could shoot, kill, gas people, and then show themselves to be so sensitive.”
It is this theme that hangs heavy over the programme being filmed here, inside Auschwitz, 60 years on. It gives an extra dimension to an already contentious issue: music was abused here in the most appalling circumstances; can music also help to repair the damage? Can the sweet sound of Vengerov’s violin break the silence that many thought the only proper response to the Holocaust? Indeed, can any art form help to fill a space which has become a moral black hole? Or is it too much to ask of it?
I speak on the telephone to Osvaldo Golijov, who was commissioned by the producers to write a new piece of work for the programme. He confesses to feeling “an incredible contradiction in the pit of my stomach” when he received the call. “My main reaction was that I wanted so much to run away from this, but I felt that I could not.” He too had never visited Auschwitz. “I always thought I would never go there, that it was something to avoid.”
He says he struggled for months to write the five-minute piece, “Lament”, and he composed it before he went to the camp: “It would have been impossible the other way around.” He was told the sequence in question would take place in a small forest where inmates waited before being forced to enter the gas chambers. “I wrote the piece with that location in mind. I wanted it to be an expression in sound of that place. As if the trees were witnesses.”
The work is a powerful, ugly blast of sound (”I didn’t want it to be pretty,” says Golijov), similar to a naming-litany, with a trumpet and trombone chorale acting as the “chorus of the dead unsilenced”, and blasts of the shofar, an ancient Hebraic instrument, representing both a “primal howl of pain and at the same time the affirmation of Hitler’s defeat”.
Primo Levi wrote that the tunes played by the camp orchestra were “the voice of the Lager; the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us, first as men, in order to kill us more slowly afterwards”. Peter Maniura wants his programme to begin to rehabilitate music as an art form, but not let it off the hook entirely. “Was music really raped? Was it abused, or is it beyond abuse? It is our duty to confront those questions, and start to lay bare the way in which music can be the most magical of the arts, and also the most dangerous.”
”Holocaust - A Music Memorial Film From Auschwitz” is screened on BBC2 on January 22.
