Temple of the Scapegoat

by Alexander Kluge

  — Insofar as the war hadn’t already been lost in 1911, 1914, 1918. Peace and success were elusive but possible until September 1940. After that, there was little chance to make up ground, because the provocations that caused one failure of leadership after another came too thick and fast.

  Hitler’s Favorite Operetta: The Merry Widow

  They said that Hitler knew the prisoner by name. The prisoners to be deported stood about in groups at the assembly point, a schoolyard. From there they would be escorted to the freight train headed for Magdeburg. The train was waiting at a considerable distance from the freight depot.

  It was claimed that this particular prisoner had written the libretto of Adolf Hitler’s favorite operetta, and thus special treatment was called for, e.g., release. Otherwise there might be complaints. Likewise you could hardly put a World War I Pour le mérite recipient or a flying ace on one of those freight trains, i.e., on the path to doom, without thoroughly reviewing the particulars of his case. After all, the prisoner hadn’t merely been that enchanting operetta’s librettist, he was its author still. You couldn’t tell the prisoner’s status by looking at him. And so the man (a Party member) in favor of making an exception said to SS-Scharführer Hinrichs: Set this prisoner apart. Select him — in a positive sense. Otherwise you can’t be sure there won’t be trouble.

  And so several of the people who’d been rounded up, as well as third parties from the town — for instance an Aryan lawyer and some NSDAP members recruited by the doomed man’s friends — tried to stage an intervention: while the train was stopped for over an hour at the Oschersleben junction so that another throng of victims could be swallowed up by the Ost-Transport, negotiators approached the guards. (They had followed the train in automobiles.)

  Having circumvented the capital of the Reich and crossed the Cottbus–Guben railroad line, the prisoners’ grim freight train kept stopping to let military transports pass; each stop stirred hopes of receiving countermanding orders.

  The writer of the lines “Strings are playing, hear them saying, ‘Love me true’” was convinced that a command from one of the higher-up henchmen, one of the older officers, would cause him to be recognized and freed from his “VEXING QUANDARY.” He had a passable knack for piano improvisation. Perhaps he’d find a place in the officers’ club orchestra at the camp?

  He was filled with hope, though by now his intercessors had fallen hundreds of miles behind. Were they phoning? Pleading for “the higher echelons” to intervene? Even if those overworked benefactors had been activated through social connections in the town where the librettist was arrested, or perhaps phoned from the Reich Chancellery by a subaltern civil servant willing to do a favor (if it didn’t take an unreasonable amount of time), it would still have been extremely difficult to trace the lost operetta librettist. The prisoner transports were secret. It would have been impossible to find out which list of names — reported by the transport trains to the central railroad administration — would have to be checked.

  The trail was lost in the east. “You’ll find me at Maxim’s . . .” At lunch one day in May, two weeks after this train journey, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant remarked that efforts were being made to find the librettist. Hitler had last attended the operetta at the Staatsoper in 1936, but often listened to “pieces from that ravishing tearjerker” on the phonograph. He heard what von Below had to say, but no orders were given.

  In the winter of 1942 the librettist lost all hope. In the new society in which he’d begun his new life, “old contacts” counted for nothing. He concentrated on surviving. In the cold of the east. Then he killed himself, before the others could kill him.

  “When I see you, I must weep”

  Dr. Fritz Löhner-Beda, the lyricist of “Rosa, wir fahr’n nach Lodz” (Rosa, We’re Going to Lodz, a wartime hit in 1914), “Ausgerechnet Bananen” (Yes, We Have No Bananas), and “Ich hab’ mein Herz in Heidelberg verloren” (I Lost My Heart in Heidelberg), librettist of The Land of Smiles, Giuditta (dedicated to Mussolini by Léhar), and Ball at the Savoy, was arrested in Vienna the day after the Reich’s annexation of Austria. Transported to Dachau concentration camp with other celebrities. Lawyers, friends from the U.S.A., operetta-lovers and (to a limited extent) Franz Léhar championed his cause in vain. Relocation to Buchenwald concentration camp in September 1938. Later taken to Auschwitz. The work performance of this intellectual at the I. G. Farben factory there is not excellent. At an inspection by I. G. Farben board members, his demeanor and performance are faulted. They could have sung the hits for which Fritz Löhner-Beda wrote the words, but they did not recognize their author. Owing to his rating as inadequate, Fritz Löhner-Beda was beaten to death the following day. Units from the Office of Strategic Services who went to Austria in late April to search for persons, patents, and depots of copyright-relevant contracts were instructed to determine his whereabouts.1

  IT BEGINS WITH INFATUATION AND ENDS WITH DIVORCE.

  IT BEGINS IN 1933 AND ENDS IN RUBBLE.

  THE GREAT OPERAS BEGIN AUSPICIOUSLY, WITH HEIGHTENED EMOTIONS, AND IN ACT 5 WE COUNT THE CORPSES.

  Appearance and Reality in the Operetta

  In 1943 in Krakow, capital of the General Governorate, the German occupiers indulged in a joke. The occasion being a special performance of Karl Millöcker’s The Beggar Student for an audience of severely wounded soldiers. The plot involves a German colonel during Saxony’s dominion over Poland (from 1697 onwards) who makes overtures to a Polish noblewoman and is rebuffed with a slap in the face. Humiliated, he recruits a prisoner from one of the prisons under his command to pose as a prince, woo the noblewoman, and humiliate her in turn. In 1943, in light of current events, this flimsy intrigue was “given an extra edge.” The local police commander allowed an authentic prisoner with limited singing abilities to take part in the production. Count Czatorski, the prisoner who amused the wounded men with his inadequate (i.e., travestied) singing, really did hold the high rank claimed in the libretto. Knowing this, the soprano shivered to see the affinity between real-life events and the onstage intrigue thought up in a previous century. She, portraying a high-ranking Polish noblewoman desired by a commander of the occupying power, someone, that is, who by rights would have had a favor coming (in the operetta) if she had surrendered her innocence, was unable to save the prisoner loaned from the real Cracow prison. She would have done anything, risked losing her voice; after the performance she went to the German commanders’ box, fell to the ground, pled for the count’s life. There was no reaction from the tipsy men.

  Later on, the men responsible for the gag were unable to explain to the investigator from general headquarters, who was working with an interrogator from a rival agency, the SS Security Service, why they’d thought it would be funny. The two investigators considered the scene to be “completely inappropriate.”

  It still seemed macabre to have a condemned man appear in a light opera intended to be amusing. For difficult arias, the guards shoved him onto the stage, where he acted according to instructions while Polish singers sang his part from the wings. The SS investigator, an SS colonel, and the representative of the general headquarters, a lieutenant-colonel, agreed that it would have been in keeping with the “spirit of the operetta” if (utilizing the ups and downs of the operetta plot) the prisoner had been spared the death penalty. An examination of the files revealed that he hadn’t been charged with a capital crime; rather, his death would result from the general policy of exterminating Polish nobility (and even those noble families remaining from the time of Austrian rule) for security reasons. You can’t make a joke, said the SS colonel, Dr. Hans Rudolfs by name, only to kill in bitter earnest.

  After hearing of the conflict, several of the wounded men from the audience wrote petitions. They boasted high distinctions, Knight’s Crosses. That was no use either. For a moment the performance (the gag thought up by the stage director) and the reality converged to such an extent that
the plot from the “fusty eighteenth century” could actually have unfolded into the “National Socialist present.” That would have meant releasing the man, and, if he wished, even marrying the count to the soprano, if she were agreeable (and she was). As such, there was nothing to prevent this happening, nothing except inertia. Count Czatorski was shot three days after the premiere. Just twelve days later the lieutenant-colonel and the SS-colonel managed to obtain exceptional permission for the prisoner’s release from the Reichsführer SS and the High Command of the Wehrmacht. The Reichsführer SS had been talked into it by Colonel Rudolfs, who pointed out that according to traditional Germanic custom, a blunder on the part of the executioner (for instance, a blow that missed the neck) meant that the execution had to be called off. The analogy to the case of “misappropriating the prisoner” seemed plausible to the Reichsführer, and he gave his approval. That period saw an inflationary increase in phoned-in approval over life and death.

  The Bandits (Jacques Offenbach)

  The works Jacques Offenbach wrote for his variety theater in Paris are neither operas (apart from The Tales of Hoffmann) nor operettas; they are satirical plays with music, invoking prior knowledge on the part of the audience.

  Offenbach wrote The Bandits (Les Brigands) in just a few days, in the late fall of 1869. A band of robbers, the type we know from Schiller’s play, straight from the German forest, are planning their big coup, trying to get in on financial speculations in the capital. Paris has been completely rebuilt by Baron Haussmann, creating value. A key role is played by a Hohenzollern prince with designs on the Spanish throne, which months later will lead to the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. In 1941, the bandits’ opening chorus will become the signature tune of the French resistance.

  The piece was originally written for a seven-man orchestra (trumpet, piano, accordion, violin, kettledrum, trombone, conductor) and five singers performing twenty-eight roles.

  On the eve of a European war, every facet of the impending crisis is caricatured onstage. What gave Offenbach such powers of premonition? At the end of the war, Germany, the robbers’ homeland, is united; the Reich is founded in Versailles, a palace in a foreign country, a preposterous location foreshadowed by Offenbach’s border station between Spain and Italy. The indemnity which France paid to Germany under the terms of the armistice is already hinted at in the drama. The Palace of Versailles, the Sun King’s royal seat, sealed the defeat of France and the establishment of the German Reich, and, forty-eight years later, the defeat of that Reich and France’s victory, just as the dining car used for the signing of the armistice, parked in Compiègne, was the site of Hitler’s triumph over France twenty-one years after that — this is the principle of foreshortening and dramaturgy used throughout this opera by Offenbach. Prophecy encompassing sixty-nine years in a drama that Offenbach wrote in two weeks. What a Cassandra!

  My Passion Burns Hotter than Goulash

  (Countess Maritza by Emmerich Kálmán)

  In 1918 Hungary is humiliated (even more brutally than Austria and the German Reich). Hungary experiences the most radical inflation of all European countries. Rumania and Czechoslovakia have annexed considerable parts of its territory. Hungary’s banks and agrarian estates are on their last legs.

  Emmerich Kálmán’s hit operetta COUNTESS MARITZA is a response to this existential crisis. Humiliation in operetta form, mirthful capitulation. This phenomenon was not repeated in 1945.

  An aristocrat who has lost all his land and now seeks only to provide for his sister enters the service of a nouveau riche landowner, Countess Maritza. The cantankerous woman and the cantankerous man fall for each other. The hero’s concern for his sister is construed as faithlessness. A lucky coincidence reunites the lovers.

  Later, certain East German theaters try to extricate the catchy music from its original context: the operetta is now about an activist who heads a kolkhoz, copes with misunderstandings, and wins the hand of a young workers’ council member. It is not a hit. Mirth cannot be disentangled from the misery that gave rise to it (Theodor W. Adorno).

  The duet “My Passion Burns Hotter than Goulash” is the high point of the second act.

  THE SADNESS OF OPERETTAS WHEN PERFORMED IN A REAL OPERA HOUSE

  BATACLAN, A CHINOISERIE MUSICALE

  THE DARK NIGHT SKY OVER PARIS ON NOVEMBER 13, 2015

  Nothing but Music between Body and Mind

  At first she’d had nothing to fall back on but “the blood of her family,” a fuel that, in the hands of the Sarajevo Music Academy, made her a disciplined voice and reader of notes, tilling music’s sacred soil. Now she lived in one of Europe’s great cities. This season she was singing ANTIGONA2 in the eponymous “model opera of the Enlightenment” by Tommaso Traetta. She trusted the devoted conductor, a specialist in baroque opera, just as she’d bestowed her trust on all those who had supported her career, drawing on a store of openness that, given the explosive social tensions in her homeland, could only have come down from distant ancestors.

  She had a right-hand man, a young fellow she’d picked up somewhere and shared a bed with, bodies nestled together in communion, like brother and sister, no more, for she saw herself as a chaste disciple of art. Nor was she sure she truly loved the rescued boy who took such pains for her, though the current of contentment between their bodies at night (without particularly ardent desire) suggested a certain intimacy had developed. But commitment is taken a day at a time, she told herself, and every day she saw plenty of reasons to make this man the sole focus of her emotional ambitions. They talked a great deal; that spoke in his favor. He struck her as an astute, scholarly man, utterly lacking the down-to-earth quality she was used to. Often he surprised her. For her sake he researched the Antigone story at the university library.

  The singer’s concrete problem was the long vocal lines, written for a castrato and not easily imitated by a woman’s soprano trained in the modern manner. Irina had to temper her “bellows” — which made a thin, concentrated air current flow past her vocal cords — to last a length of time that depleted her breath.

  She was an angler “in the waters of oblivion” — her chaste lover used such beautiful expressions, that scholarly little brother who grew dearer to her from one nighttime conversation to the next. Compared to her disappointing experiences with success-spoiled love-apostles, he was a delightful soul, indeed a miracle.

  Antigone is not a mad aristocratic fighter, her scout reported, she is a HEALER. It’s not just the rebellious brother she wants to bury, it’s the curse that rests upon the family. But Creon, representing the law, is a stranger to the MAGNANIMITY OF OBLIVION. There is too much at stake for him: all the male descendants of King Oedipus, whom the people still love despite his patricide and his blindness, have killed each other, and Creon has seized power. The law, claimed the companion of the woman singing Antigone, is an excuse for him to consolidate his power. The sons of Oedipus, who caused the civil war, must not be buried, as fodder for the ravens they must be visibly surrendered up to shame. By that same token, Caesar’s murderers were defeated when they (and their senate faction) agreed to Caesar’s burial (rather than tossing him into the Tiber like a tyrant).

  Like all forces of justice, Creon has an interest in delivering guilt from oblivion: by contrast, Princess Antigone takes passionate action to reject the whole legacy of misfortune that clings to the soles of her family’s feet. She would rather suffer misfortune herself than infect third parties with her misfortune. She wants to hide her dead brothers in the “waters of oblivion” (or, in landlocked Thebes, the depths of the earth). She knows how pointless it is to keep down the dead by placing stones on their graves. To confine them, it’s better to trust their willfulness: trust that it will take them through the bedrock to the vicinity of Gibraltar, where the entrance to Hades lies. The message is that the dead are on the move, claims the source of nighttime warmth, citing G. W. F. Hegel’s “Ethical Action, Human and Divi
ne Knowledge, Guilt and Fate.”

  The “assistant of her nights,” her candidate for lifelong commitment, provided Irina with food for thought, which turned out to benefit her vocal prowess. Now he studied the score of Antigona, along with Hegel’s works. Traetta’s model opera belonged to a “musical revolution” that took place in the eighteenth century along the axes of Paris (Gluck), Stockholm (Joseph Martin Kraus), and St. Petersburg (Traetta): a revolt of reason against pure music.

  At Empress Catherine’s command, Traetta had altered the roles of Haimon and Creon to depart from Sophocles’ original. Creon’s aim was to claim Oedipus’s youngest daughter, Ismene, as his servant and lover and perhaps later on as his wife. In turn, Antigone would marry the ruler’s son, Haimon (Emone in the opera). What the usurper Creon couldn’t know was that Haimon loved the rebellious Antigone with all his fresh young heart, blindly and with no concern for his own life. In the third act of the opera the two are seen sheltering in an open tomb. They would rather kill themselves than be separated because just one of them is condemned to death. Two duets reveal this libidinous relationship, budding amidst the theater’s usual historical dramatics, to be the opera’s true heart, in terms of the libretto and the music.

  Neither the “simple will of the people” (which Creon instrumentalizes and corrupts) nor “blood and family” (Antigone’s burden) is of ultimate significance.

  According to the findings of Irina’s friend, Empress Catherine refused to watch an opera with a constantly recurring tragic conclusion. Sixty-four times, she said, she had watched the tragedy of Oedipus and his children in Greek or in French, and always with a catastrophic ending: as empress, surely she had the right, just this once, to demand a death-free conclusion. In her opinion, the Enlightenment project in holy Russia called for uplifting stories. Enlightenment without happiness is dead, she said.