Re: Germans and Klezmer

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

> The Torah speaks of
> punishing the sins the sons for generations for the sins of the father, but
> I see that as the prerogative of G*d to judge that isn't allowed to mankind.

If I may say, there is perhaps a natural divine punishment system which
I can see, but it is very difficult to express without inviting
controversy: The punishment exists exactly in the difficulties which the
new German generation has in dealing with members of their family who
have been involved as Nazis. The Nazi movement was such an
all-uncompassing mass hysteria, that today there are few families who
don't somewhere have a former member among them. The biggest dilemma
which those of the younger generation with ethic conscience have is
dealing with this Hamletesque, no-win situation: 

How to maintain their own moral integrity and still preserve their
loyalty to their family. 

I'm not suggesting sympathy for this, just laying out what I have
experienced over 15 years in ceaseless discussions with even my closest
friends here in Austria. These discussions have broken up some of these
friendships. Others remain with scars, some continue on with a tacit
agreement not to touch this theme. 

The working out of that theme stands at the nucleus of many (not all)
German klezmer musicians' mental constellation. This is one explanation
that I have for the lack of contact with Jews and Germans back in the
80's when Germans first started to play klezmer music. They were playing
out a fight that had nothing to do with any relationship of Jews to
Germans, but rather of young Germans to older generation Germans. In
some ways, the fight needed to be played out on a private stage which
deliberately excluded Jews as spectators, but used their music
symbolically as a non-lethal weapon. As a young German you didn't need
to sit at the Sunday Mittagessen with the whole family screaming
helplessly at the top your lungs at your SS grandpa when he used the
term Judenschwein. There was a much more powerful weapon at hand- you
could go out, gather your buddies and play Dona, Dona at the local
Wirtshaus, calling yourself "Three fiddles, no Yiddles." 

To do this then was much easier without asking Jews, because what would
you do if the Jews whose music you were playing thought you were a bunch
of bungholes with an attitude? To avoid the problem of validation
altogether was the easiest way, but some braved it and sought contact
with Jews, sometimes with positive results, sometimes not. Some became
disulliusioned when they were not received positively for their valiant
efforts and struggled with the new feeling of showing solidarity with
people they could only see as difficult at best, sometimes downright
mean. The philo-anti-Semitic love-hate dichotomy could not have been
seen more clearly than in these encounters. I witnessed many, especially
back in the 1980's, say, when Claude Landsmann came to a small theatre
in Graz and the all the philo-Semitic artists and Germanic studies
students came out of the woodwork to attend his lecture after the movie.
It was a fiasco of philo-Semitic ambivalence that sent that University
audience home with eyes that looked like pinwheels. Many came to the
lecture out of sympathy and left wondering what they were feeling now,
shocked that even 40 years after the end of the Holocaust, their efforts
as modern day alternative Christian mavericks with
well-meaning-stand-up-for-the-underdog ideologies could possibly be met
with a "We don't need you, we don't want you, go home and play with
papa's Hakenkreuz" response from the Jews who found themselves present
at the event, poised to pounce. 

That was over 10 years ago. Since then there has been some growing up
but only among those wh stuck it out. Still, I don't believe that
anything can be "solved." Germans who use klezmer music in this
utilitarian way overstep a basic boundary. And its impossible to witness
this as a Jew without a feeling of resentment. But there are positive
sides to the phenomenon as a whole, and in my opinion this lies solely
in the way that some Germans have learned to navigate the compartments
of the hornets nest they have willingly stepped into. Virtually all of
these Germans work TOGETHER with Jews, not FOR them or on their behalf.
You'd be surprised at how, when this happens, boundaries become more
visible, but not terrifying. It reminds me of a quote loosely
paraphrased from Carl Jung: The most important problems we encounter
have no solutions. At some point we simply outgrow them ... Josh
Horowitz

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