THE INEXTINGUISHABLE SYMPHONY: A TRUE STORY OF MUSIC AND LOVE IN NAZI GERMANY; by Martin Goldsmith; John Wiley and Sons, 346 pages; $24.95
In this thoroughly engaging book, a son discovers the traumatic experiences of his remarkable parents. Martin Goldsmith has carefully researched and written the story of his musical parents, who played with an all-Jewish orchestra in Germany just before the horrors of the Holocaust.
In the spring of 1933, more than 8,000 Jewish musicians, actors and other artists were expelled from their positions with German orchestras. As the world watched, the nervous Nazis, under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, created Kulturbund in Berlin as a false symbol, not only of German culture, but of Jewish acceptance. How could anyone think Jews were treated badly after taking in a concert by such an impressive orchestra?
Kulturbund was encouraged and maintained under Hitler's Nazi regime as "a temporary solution" to what Nazis considered the "Jewish problem." With the new regime in power, Hitler's vicious anti-Semitic views took center stage. Initially, the answer was thought to be taking Jews out of the mainstream of German life, cultivating a form of segregation.
Little by little, Jews were robbed of their most basic rights and possessions.
But to those connected with the orchestra, there was a rare musical and spiritual refuge. Gunther and Rosemarie were two of those lucky ones, who watched as loved ones were taken from their homes and deported to concentration camps. By June 1941, they had the good fortune to secure passports, visas and places on a ship bound for the United States, where they regained their freedom. Rosemarie resumed her musical career with American orchestras, but Gunther abandoned his music and took up retailing.
As they raised their family, they said little or nothing about their Holocaust experiences, until their son, Martin, finally persuaded his father to open up. He was plagued by "an enormous tree growing up through the roof," symbolizing the unspoken horrors of the Holocaust.
All their lives, Gunther and Rosemarie nursed profound feelings of guilt about their more charmed lives in the orchestra, which enabled them to escape the furnaces of the concentration camps while their friends and loved ones did not. Their children, including Martin, experienced it also, without understanding why. The parents' amazing past needed to be mined and discussed to relieve the stress and allow a more healthful approach to life.
Often reading like a novel, Goldsmith's book is eloquent and moving. Over and over again, it demonstrates the unique power of music in people's lives, for spirituality and rejuvenation. Goldsmith describes Kulturbund's performances of both Gustave Mahler's "Resurrection Symphony" and Carl Nielsen's "Inextinguishable Symphony," symbolizing the durability of both music and life.
The author describes Gunther's and Rosemarie's feelings during Mahler's impressive work. They "experienced an awe they had previously known only in the presence of an incandescent sunset, a tumultuous thunderstorm or some similarly splendid composition of nature."
The audience, comprising more than a thousand people, including men and women who knew suffering on a daily basis, "heard from a valiant ensemble of artists who had struggled, along with them, a vibrant musical account of their difficulties and then the infinitely hopeful message that they had not lived and suffered in vain, and that from their depths, they would rise again."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com