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In Reply to: RE: What is it with people's impressions of Karajan posted by Logan on October 16, 2009 at 20:21:00
I'll see what I can find. Perhaps others on this board can help.
If Boehm's behavior bothers you, you should avoid Karajan like a demon. Since my own in-laws were enthusiastic NSDAP'ers, fond of making appalling anti-Semitic remarks, I tend to be more charitable than most on the subject of ordinary citizens joining the Party (are you familiar with the term "Drang zur Partei"? If not, look it up.) I was fourteen when I arrived in Munich, and the signs of war (bombed out buildings, rubble, veterans missing arms, legs, and eyes) were everywhere. And this was 1960. Discussions of whose parents/teachers/elected officials had Party affiliations was the number one topic of conversation among German youth my age. Given Karajan's political power, I'm not surprised that most traces of his prewar/wartime activities were diligently erased. During my years in Germany, the country elected Georg Kiesinger as Chancellor. Only much later did it come out he had been an SS officer.
Follow Ups:
"If Boehm's behaviour bothers you, you should avoid Karajan like a demon", you state.
I'm sorry, but this is not 1984. I have and will consider the evidence (including contributions to this thread), but in the end I'll make up my own mind. And if eminent Jewish musicians such as Bernstein and
Barenboim have seen their way clear to perform the music of a viper like Wagner I'm more inclined to take a lead from them rather than from your directive.
There are much better and less disputed targets than Karajan anyway. Have a look at Clemens Krauss and Mengelberg sometime.
I merely thought it odd you would shun Boehm and embrace Karajan.
When vK brought the BPO to America on tour in 1955, many American Jewish musicians avoided or shunned him. They knew his reputation and history even before these became common knowledge. Eugene Ormandy, a Hungarian Jew, was introduced to vK in Philadephia but refused to shake his hand or say more than a few words in his presence.
I have said all I know about Karajan in my posts on this forum, today and earlier. You and everyone else here are free to read my comments and decide for themselves.
I don't know you and can't worry about how much "proof" is required to change your mind on this subject.
I can't for the life of me find any statement I made that would justify your accusing me of "embracing" Karajan. I merely stated that I owned some of his recordings and none by Böhm.
This fabrication weakens whatever argument you're trying to foment. And remarks concerning the requirements to change my mind are reminiscent of the tactics used by the Spanish Inquisition, the Stalinist USSR, Orwell's 1984, Joseph McCarthy, and Al Quaeda to mold public opinion and subvert freedom of informed opinion.
For all you know I might well agree with you on Karajan's political history. But in the face of belligerent attempts at manipulation I would certainly not give you the satisfaction of admitting it.
In the context of the enormity of Nazi crimes, going after minnows like Karajan reminds me of McCarthy, who ended up persecuting a NJ army dentist after originally accusing the entire State Department of being riddled with "card-carrying communists". Having ignored my suggestion to consider active and unrepentant Nazi conductors like Krauss and Mengelberg, you might alternatively like to explain why the US government of the time gave a free ride to people such as Werner Heisenberg and Wernher von Braun, who did far more to advance the Nazi cause than did Karajan or Böhm.
My, we are trotting out the Big Guns, aren't we? OK, you don't "embrace". Perhaps "tolerate" would be better. It matters not.
As to my being belligerent, understand that Nazi Germany and its crimes to me are not abstract concepts, subject to college debating team tactics. At least my German in-laws, and most of their generation, have died. However, the racial discrimination they advocated lives on in the Holocaust deniers and bigots of today.
Your post is bluster and hot air. Take it somewhere else.
not even bellicose! Your arguing style appears to me (an aging academic) essentially moderate.
Come for dinner should you ever venture to Ottawa in the Great White North. I doubt it, but I may have some Toscaninis that you missed.
Jeremy
I'd be honored.
not even bellicose! Your arguing style appears to me (an aging academic) essentially moderate.
Come for dinner should you ever venture to Ottawa in the Great White North. I doubt it, but I may have some Toscaninis that you missed.
Jeremy
And I thought that the Nazis were the personification of bullying bluster. It would appear that you learned more from your German sojourn than you realised. Get the jackboots off and get this ridiculous debate into perspective.
You don't know me, you don't know my history and my background, and since I choose not to parade them on an audio forum you're not going to know. I'll go somewhere else when I choose - not when bullies like you try to order me.
Thanks. It's been quite a while since we've seen so many non-sequiturs, straw men, and pretzel logic here on Music Lane. The prize is yours!
While I've said quite enough already, I think Mr. Lucky is still game if you want to fight.
"However, the racial discrimination they advocated lives on in the Holocaust deniers and bigots of today."
There aren't any of those in the conducting circuit to my knowledge, or in the classical recording ranks, so you can stand down now and relax.
You're absolutely right.
Hasn't Christian Thielemann made some comments? -something like "Now the Jewish mess is ended" when Barenboim left his position in Berlin? He later denied this in an interview in the "Guardian", but can anyone confirm or disprove this?
In the words of my late German mother in law, long after I had married her daughter and was "one of the family":
"We didn't kill enough of them."
However, she and her husband were not exactly patrons of the arts.
I had a neighbour, an "anglo-Canadian", in Toronto in the late 1950s, who taught his children the same thing -- "The only thing Hitler did wrong was that he didn't finish the job." The words, taught me by his son (a classmate), still ring in my ears.
Jeremy
I had a neighbour, an "anglo-Canadian", in Toronto in the late 1950s, who taught his children the same thing -- "The only thing Hitler did wrong was that he didn't finish the job." The words, taught me by his son (a classmate), still ring in my ears.
Jeremy
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