Christian Meyer
A klezmer jam session at the
restaurant Shakespeare's in
Weimar last month: a renaissance
of Jewish music without Jews.
Posted on 08/29/2004 4:44:46 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Christian Meyer
A klezmer jam session at the
restaurant Shakespeare's in
Weimar last month: a renaissance
of Jewish music without Jews.
WEIMAR, Germany
ON a hill a few miles outside this historic city, the Ettersburg Palace sits in ramshackle splendor, thickly enshrouded by the German past. Illustrious figures like Bach, Goethe and Schiller came through here, but just beyond a ridge lies the other side of German history: the concentration camp of Buchenwald, among the darkest sites of the 20th century.
Both histories loomed in the background recently, as warm strains of Jewish music filled the castle. A talented klezmer duo of accordion and violin performed late into the night, offering doleful Yiddish songs, sky-bound instrumental tunes and playful patter about Jewish weddings and even Jewish recipes for borscht. The audience listened intently and cheered the players back for several encores. Just one thing was missing from the scene. There were almost no Jews.
This evening and its backdrop summarize in one swoop the curious, complex and sometimes troubling world of klezmer music in Germany. National interest in this genre, broadly defined as Eastern European Jewish folk music, has surged, with experts counting more than 100 klezmer bands across the country. This summer in Berlin one could hear the music performed every night of the week. Record sales are strong, and festivals and workshops have multiplied. One label director called Germany the strongest klezmer market in the world, even ahead of the United States, where a revival in the 1980's and 90's brought the genre popularity among middle-aged listeners and a younger generation of roots-seeking American Jews.
But with few exceptions, the klezmer scene in Germany is a non-Jewish phenomenon, a renaissance of Jewish culture without Jews, prompting a wide range of reactions here and abroad, from bewilderment and cautious approval to cynicism and reproach.
On one hand, it can perhaps be seen as an example of the broader world-music trend toward genre tourism. The music, after all, has its own immediate appeal with its dance-worthy rhythms, bounding expressive lines and the built-in joyfulness of a historic wedding repertory. And what could be more welcome than a sincere German willingness to explore and appreciate these Jewish musical riches as part of the process of remembrance, reconciliation and healing?
On the other hand, some skeptics question whether the notion of Germans enjoying and profiting from a largely decimated Jewish cultural tradition may be just another postwar injustice.
Even those open to the scene have wondered about "cultural reparations" and about how much of the German klezmer movement is motivated by guilt and the continued process of postwar reckoning. Some academics have gone further, turning a critical eye on European philo-Semitism itself, seeing it as a culturally sanctioned way of making Jews exotic while, as with anti-Semitism, imposing a preconceived definition on an entire group from the outside.
Yet even with its loaded politics, the klezmer scene here continues to thrive, and at a relatively high artistic level. Among the Jewish-music events this summer was Klezmer Wochen Weimar (Weimar Klezmer Weeks), a monthlong festival and workshop in its fourth season. More than 160 participants, mostly German musicians in their 20's and 30's, came to study Yiddish song, Yiddish language, instrumental music and traditional dance from a mostly American-Jewish faculty.
The festival is directed by Alan Bern, an American pianist and co-founder of the pioneering klezmer ensemble Brave Old World, who lived for many years in Berlin. In conversation, Mr. Bern shows a keen awareness of all the pitfalls of German klezmer but praises the approach of the musicians who take part in his workshops.
"The students who come here, not all of them but many of them, bring their hearts and their souls and their minds and their ears," he said. "There is a very serious commitment to understanding what's going on, and not just the historical dimensions but the sensibility that's at the core of this music."
Mr. Bern's observation seems borne out by the example of Roswitha Dasch, 41, and Katharina Müther, 51, the non-Jewish violinist and accordionist who performed in the castle. Both have immersed themselves in Yiddish language, culture and music for more than a decade and have developed intense emotional attachments to it all.
"When I was 8 or 9, I first heard Jewish music on the radio and was so deeply touched by it," Ms. Müther said. "There were virtually no Jews in Germany when I was young, so I felt I wanted to help this music to revive, just to give it to other people again."
Ms. Dasch added: "It is like a gift you give to the audience."
Onstage and in conversation, the two musicians' devotion to klezmer comes through clearly, though as with many of the participants, it is far more difficult to grasp the complex set of motivations that drives their commitment. Beyond shared aesthetic sensibilities, every musician here comes for a different set of reasons.
Age factors in, with older German musicians perhaps feeling a closer or more direct connection to the wartime past. But the legacy of the divided Germany also leaves its mark. After the war, the Communist East claimed the mantle of antifascist resistance and deflected much blame and responsibility for Nazi atrocities to its West German counterpart. Those who grew up in the former East may thus be grappling with the past in ways that are rawer, or perhaps less linked to feelings of guilt, since they were weaned on a different version of the history.
THE broad interest in klezmer began two decades ago, when Jewish klezmer musicians first toured Germany and discovered a public that was wildly receptive. As the German bassist Heiko Lehmann has written, klezmer was "the first Jewish thing aside from guilt that the Germans got after the war."
Musicians involved in the early tours reported reverential crowds and thunderous applause. "We were carried on people's shoulders, almost literally," said Michael Alpert, the founding vocalist of Brave Old World and one of the first American klezmer musicians to tour in Germany.
The fertile environment also propelled the career of the Israeli clarinetist Giora Feidman, who rose to prominence here in part by preaching a doctrine of musical inclusion and bridge-building. He defined klezmer less as a genre than as a musical-spiritual approach that could be applied to any music, much as others would transform the recondite Jewish mystical tradition of kabala into the basis for an all-embracing New Age practice. Mr. Feidman's path drew criticism in many quarters for stripping the music of its particularity and its history, even as it attracted German audiences responding to the openness and the implicit promise of forgiveness that Mr. Feidman and his music seemed to offer.
Both Mr. Feidman and the American-Jewish performers made repeated tours and founded workshops to which young Germans flocked. In one convenient twist, German audiences could understand large amounts of spoken Yiddish — often more than their American counterparts — because of its similarities to German.
By the early 1990's, groups were springing up in most major German cities, and the country's homegrown klezmer scene was developing with startling speed. The music was used in public ceremonies and in the media, becoming the unofficial soundtrack of the German-Jewish reconciliation process.
Yet klezmer's sudden popularity left more than a few listeners highly ambivalent, especially because of the facile role-swapping it seemed to promote. "The kind of klezmer we have here helps Germans to identify with Jewish victims rather than the perpetrators," said Iris Weiss, a German-Jewish writer, researcher and cultural activist. "It therefore allowed them to avoid confrontation with their own family history."
A sharp critic of German klezmer, Ms. Weiss is particularly suspicious of the stereotypes that she says have accompanied the movement, equating all Jews with the lost shtetl culture of Eastern Europe and helping to create an atmosphere she has described as "Jewish Disneyland." She argues that the images alienate the country's actual Jews (now numbering more than 100,000) while obscuring a rich local Jewish history that dates back more than 1,000 years. "Jews living here are not shtetl Jews, and the stereotypes become an obstacle to real contact."
Ms. Weiss's point also hints at a larger paradox: klezmer music, for all its new-found resonance and symbolism in German society, never had much of a following among German Jews even before the war. It developed primarily as an instrumental genre for wedding celebrations in Eastern European Jewish communities. Living farther west, many German Jews of the 19th century were drawn to the Enlightenment promise of equality. They sought the rewards of full integration into German society, and fluency in German culture was a mark of that achievement.
These German Jews were therefore more likely to read Schiller or listen to Beethoven than to contemplate the soulful symmetries of a Yiddish song. The "return" of klezmer to Germany is thus nothing of the sort but rather a collective German excursion into an imagined Jewish past.
Still, despite the lingering challenges, there is evidence of maturation in the German klezmer scene of recent years. The music's trendiness may have crested, leaving room for more sustained and serious commitment. And after more than a decade of work, some of the best German klezmer musicians are showing not just a technical facility that may already rival that of American-Jewish performers but also a deepened understanding that may finally be moving beyond what Mr. Alpert aptly describes as "the cycle of guilt and blame, an inability to forgive and an endless searching for forgiveness."
The German clarinetist Christian Dawid seems to agree. "The assumption that you can overcome history by using culture or music is just wrong," he said. "And the deeper you get into an understanding of Jewish culture, the more differentiated the whole picture gets. You learn to see that political and guilt motivations have little to do with the Yiddish cultural language. You also learn what I think every non-Jewish German has to realize, that this is not a culture of victims, even though that image is still very strong here."
If Mr. Dawid is right, German klezmer may be evolving into the ground for a sort of proxy dialogue, a process through which Germans address not Jews, who largely avoid the concerts, but other Germans about their common past and their relationship to a Yiddish world that was destroyed. How far that dialogue progresses will probably depend on the willingness of the musicians and audiences to probe beyond the surface of the music, rather than merely contenting themselves with the feel-good "Jewish" flavor that the genre can provide.
In Weimar at least, there were signs of hope this summer. During a week of classes devoted to Yiddish song, the special guest was the 84-year-old Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, a diminutive yet feisty Yiddish poet who was born in Vienna, survived the war in Europe and now lives in the Bronx. Every morning just before lunch, she presented her folk-styled poems and songs, speaking in fluid, sonorous Yiddish. One poem, "Wayl Ikh Bin a Tsvayg" ("For I Am a Branch"), described a lonely branch that yearns to blossom even though its trunk has died: an allegory for secular Yiddish culture today, or for the plight of a solitary survivor like herself. It is set to a sad and simple melody, and after the group had sung it, several students were visibly moved.
Ms. Gottesman was surprised and touched by their response. She even asked one student in earnest, "Do you have a cold, or do you really cry?"
Her perspective contrasted with that of some of the festival faculty, who expressed their ambivalence, their struggles to be understood as contemporary Jewish musicians in Germany and even their skepticism that some of the students, regardless of their musical or linguistic facility, could connect with the emotional pathos that underlies this music at the deepest levels. For her part, Ms. Gottesman seemed surprisingly at peace with it all.
"It's right," she said simply. "The Jewish participation in the non-Jewish world was so overwhelming through the years, it's only right that they should come to find out about us."
She paused, her bright eyes scanning an empty tabletop, then added: "Their interest is just in time. I hope it is honest, and that it is meaningful."
culture snob
??
classical music showoff ;-)
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but there are a number of Freepers that know things that other Freepers don't; I have learned a lot on these boards and only rarely have I seen it as showing off, but rather as a sharing of knowledge and/or experience.
And to think that I complimented you in a post above...yikes! No good deed goes unpunished.
It was a JOKE *LOL* I've been listening to Beethoven since I was first grade.
It is difficult to read irony or sarcasm or joking around from a post (as you know).
Yup I know, and in the spirit of peeeeeeace and looooove and reconciliation here's a pic to make you feel warm and fuzzy in your freepmail.
This is the part of the article I was referring to .
Thanks for clarifying. Please understand that there are some--Jews as well as non-Jews--who will be angry with Germans forever and will question anything and everything they do. To blame today's Germans for the sins of their fathers and grandfathers is insane, and I have nothing to do with those sentiments. That is how I bring up my children.
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