2023-11-20 19:26:00
A documentary film made by DW and dedicated to the fate of two musicians in the “Third Reich” has been nominated for an International Emmy Award (International Emmy Awards) in the category “Arts Programming”. The awards will be presented on Monday, November 20, in New York. This is DW’s first Emmy nomination in the media company’s history.
The International Emmy Awards are a television award presented by the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences as part of the Emmy Awards, the premier domestic television awards show in the United States. The International Emmy annually honors the best television programs produced outside the United States. The award is considered one of the most prestigious among its kind in the world.
What is the DW film about?
Cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was 17 years old when she was deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, in December 1943. Shortly before this, the Nazis took her parents away to an unknown destination. And Anita had no illusions. The girl had no doubt: death awaited her in the concentration camp, and arrival there was the last stop on her life’s journey. But, despite everything, she survived and now, at 98 years old, she never stops telling people around the world about the horrors of Nazism – so that this never happens again.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is the subject of the DW documentary “Der Klang der Diktatur – Klassik unterm Hakenkreuz” (“The Sound of Dictatorship. Classical Music Under the Swastika”), shot by Austrian director, screenwriter and cameraman Christian Berger.
As part of the camp orchestra
“I played the cello,” the frightened girl answered quietly when, during the “reception ceremony” in the concentration camp, she was asked what she had done before. Soon after this, the leader of the newly formed orchestra of concentration camp prisoners, Alma Rosé, was sent to her. “I stand in front of her naked, shivering from the cold, and she asks me: where did you study music? Crazy conversation…”
The “crazy” conversation ended with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch being accepted into the camp orchestra, which consisted of 56 girls. So the cello saved her life. “We were just children and played at an amateur level,” says the former prisoner in an interview for the DW documentary.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch fell in love with the cello as a child. Photo: Privat
Alma Rose, the niece of the Jewish-Austrian composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, who was branded by the Nazis as a composer of “degenerate” music, herself arranged the works selected to compile the repertoire for the hastily assembled orchestra. Most of the program was occupied by marches, which the orchestra performed every morning and evening in any weather, even in the terrible cold, at the gates of the women’s concentration camp, when columns of prisoners went to work and when they returned to the barracks. The cellist was freed from hard work, but did not feel safe. She understood: as long as music was needed in the concentration camp, the Nazis would not send the orchestra members to the gas chamber, but this was just a delay…
Culture in the service of Nazism
But what was the purpose of music in Nazi concentration camps? Why was it performed for people doomed to death? “This mentality is so perverted that it is difficult to understand. One thing is clear: music and art had to be used as part of a mass murder machine,” Norman Lebrecht said in an interview with DW. This British music journalist has been researching the role of classical music under National Socialism for many years. “A thriving culture was one of the ways to justify the Nazi regime in Germany. The Nazis could say: we are, after all, a cultural nation. We would never do anything that does not correspond to cultural norms,” he explains.
Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic OrchestraPhoto: picture-alliance/Imagno/Votava
Hitler himself (Adolf Hitler) recognized the power of music: “There is no doubt that music should be treated as the greatest force that shapes the feelings and sensations that move the mind,” he said, speaking in 1938 at the Culture Days of the NSDAP Party Congress. But the reality was this: some Jewish composers and musicians were persecuted and killed by the Nazis, while others – such as Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in Auschwitz – were forced to play classics. They say that gramophone records with music performed by Jewish musicians were even part of Hitler’s private collection.
The DW documentary exposes these contradictions and also provides, for the first time, a complete picture of how classical music was used in the Third Reich. The main characters are two musicians with completely different statuses. These are the star conductor and composer Wilhelm Furtwängler, who compromised with the Nazis, and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who had no choice and survived the death camp only thanks to her musical talent.
Based on archival film materials
This dramatic period in German history comes to life thanks to archival film footage that was digitally restored especially for the DW documentary. In this film, viewers will see Hitler at the Bayreuth Festival, episodes of a concert conducted by Furtwängler in honor of the “Führer’s” birthday, the author of the Olympic anthem Richard Strauss at the opening of the XI Summer Olympic Games in August 1936 in Berlin, as well as footage of a cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, interviewed by British journalists shortly after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was deported from Auschwitz-Birkenau shortly before the end of the war.
“Hatred is poison,” said Anita Lasker-Wallfisch during her speech in the Bundestag in 2018. Photo: Wolfgang Kumm/dpa/picture alliance
Anita still remembers this interview well. The girl, who was 19 years old at that time, wanted the whole world to know about the brutal crimes committed against Jews. “What I was trying to describe actually seemed incredible. Just a fact. How to describe Bergen-Belsen? You’re walking on corpses. It’s impossible to describe,” she says.
In 1946, the cellist emigrated to the UK. She didn’t come to Germany until 1994. After decades of keeping silent about her experiences, telling people about the horrors of Nazism has now become her mission. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch travels around the world giving lectures. And in 2018, she became the main speaker at a meeting of the German parliament dedicated to the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is not embittered, she does not harbor a grudge against Germany – because, despite everything, music has always been next to her. “They are not able to destroy it! Music is music, it is inviolable,” says a former prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp.
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