Klarinet Archive - Posting 001343.txt from 2000/12

From: "Kevin Fay (LCA)" <kevinfay@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] Strauss and the Nazi Party
Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2000 16:50:38 -0500

cpaok posted:

<<<Kevin said:

"I appreciate the emotion, but decry the historical inaccuracy. R. Strauss
did not associate himself with the Nazi regime; the Nazi regime associated
itself with Strauss."
----------------------
Read that. And, again & again. Say it over & over six times real fast. Those
who are feeble-minded may buy into it. Sorry, no dice here!
mw>>

I am afraid the only thing feeble here is your insistence on looking at
complex history at only the most superficial level. While you might even
think of us as apologists for "the Nazis," it is in fact *you* who are
trivializing their transgressions here. You do this by assigning equal
moral culpability to people who, as an historical matter, were not equally
guilty.

(An aside -- Dan Leeson is many things; an anti-Semite is not one of them.
His cogent analysis on this list of the anti-Semitism built into Wagner
operas has ruined them for me (for which I am thankful). You may wish to
check some of his postings in the archives before you look truly foolish.)

Was Richard Strauss a member of the Nazi party? Absolutely -- along with
Heinrich Himmler and Oscar Schindler. Are all three equally culpable for
the holocaust? By stating that Strauss was as bad as Himmler, you are
elevating the memory of Himmler. He doesn't deserve that. It's too easy to
look at a gray world in black and white. Unfortunately, when you do, the
truly black comes out ahead. It is to this I object.

In another post, you referred to Strauss as one of the "Germans in high
positions." As a matter of historical fact, this is simply not true. By
the time of the holocaust, Strauss was very much out of favor with the Nazi
party, and indeed had fled to Vienna after spiriting his Jewish
daughter-in-law and her children to Switzerland. By 1935, he had been
stripped of his position as president of Germany's Reichsmusikkammer because
of his insistence of continuing a working relationship with a Jewish
librettist and his defense of the Jewish members of his family. This all
happened some years before the implementation of Hitler's "final solution"
-- Kristalnacht, commonly regarded as the "kick-off" for the holocaust, did
not take place until November 1938. Strauss was neither an anti-Semite nor
a functionary of the Nazi party; he certainly was not any sort of government
official, or in any way responsible for putting anyone to death. Leopold
Wlach's involvement in the VPO is getting Jewish musicians fired -- and, if
true, his membership in the SS -- surely put him on a different plane of
culpability.

Could Strauss have done more to object to Nazism? Surely. He could have
been like Toscanini, left Europe and used his position as a soapbox against
fascism. He could have been like Schindler and attempted to save 1,200 Jews
from the slaughter. You need to remember, though, that what makes Oscar
Schindler an extraordinary hero is that his heroism was extraordinary. At
the time that Schindler was risking his life, Strauss was both old and
powerless; he was over 70 years old when Hitler came to power in 1933.
Instead, he just retired to the countryside (after seeing his Jewish family
members to safety).

It must feel good to you to condemn everyone and everything German as evil;
it allows you the self-satisfied delusion that you are on the moral high
ground. But your refusal to look at the actual facts of the holocaust --
and apportion blame to those to whom properly deserve it -- is as almost as
much a disservice to holocaust victims as those pinheads whose
"scholarship" attempts to debunk the holocaust as myth. A very large part
of making sure crap like this does not happen again is to remember --
correctly -- what happened and why. That's the whole point of Wiesenthal's
scholarship and the Shoah movement, both of which you apparently seek to
ignore. Details are important indeed.

The holocaust was not just about the extermination of six million Jews. It
was far, far worse than that. On the German side, over ten million people
were "condemned by association" and killed for political dissidence,
ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion. Furthermore, the pogroms of
Stalin -- from an historical perspective inextricably linked to the
holocaust, the "other side of the coin" -- were almost as bloody.
Attributing the European genocide of the first half of the twentieth century
to some sort of innate German evilness, while certainly easy and perhaps
emotionally satisfying, is neither historically accurate nor helpful. Among
other things, it lets way too many people off the hook. All of the "-isms"
leading to the carnage -- totalitarianism, fascism, militarism, colonialism,
racism -- are linked; serious historical study requires that all be examined
in depth together. There are quite literally thousands of books on the
subject, and much serious scholarship left to do.

But first, you need to get the facts straight.

kjf

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