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."
For example, one of the best klezmer musicians in the US is an African American named Don Byron (he plays more than just klezmer).
If you want to hear an example of klezmer click here, then when at the site click on the following three examples: frailach.mid, sherele.mid and yid.mid. I have searched the web and these are the best midis around.
I thought this was pretty interesting. And, AFAIC, one cannot have enough klezmer in their life..
It's interesting (as the article notes) that klezmer was never a German-Jewish phenomenon, but much more Eastern European. The German Jews were always more interested in Beethoven and Bach.
Mickey Hart's father was a famous Klezmer musician. Benny Goodman played it when he was young. I bet he played plenty of weddings, bar mitzvah's.
I love "Heavy Shtetl" music
I suspect if Israel disappeared in a puff of smoke, they'd find a need to rid the world of each and every Jew. They are smart and work hard. Hmmm, who else does that remind you of? Americans!
I enjoy Klezmer, myself. I recommend the group Boiled in Lead.
Hasidic New Wave / Jews and the Abstract Truth
http://www.klezmershack.com/bands/hnw/jews/hnw.jews.html
I don't know jazz well, so from the first I must advise jazz afficionados to beware. I do know that I enjoy the explorations of Jewish-influenced ensembles such as John Zorn's Masada, Anthony Coleman, or even the more cerebral New Klezmer Trio. And like other Knitting Factory compatriots such as some of the above or David Krakauer, part of what sax player Greg Wall and trumpeter Frank London (better known to the public at large for his work in the Klezmatics) are doing here is defined by both pushing the limits of jazz and pushing the limits of jazz as defined by something vaguer that I might call, in this specific context, "hasidic." By "Hasidic" I mean not just that collection of melodies that comprise part of the milieu of this particular fundamentalist part of the Jewish community, but I am also calling to mind in particular the way of ecstasy induced by that combination of drink (or other path to a different state of being) and wordless melody and dance. I speak of that Jewish trance music that has been evolving since the seventeenth century, and of the approach to life that informs it.
When fundamentalist ecstasy overlaps a freer and differently ecstatic jazz, watch out!
What we have here is not a clean, safe, Ben Sidron version of Jewish jazz (which, I might add, is quite pleasant in its place, even if its place tends not to be my house). Listening to Frank London and Greg Wall intertwine as they conclude their exploration of the limits of the traditional "Tzur Mishelo," for instance, or to simply hear the driving opening chords of the "Satmer Hakafos #6," one realizes that this is not random exploration, but exploration rooted in a specific cultural experience. There is the occasional shallower effort--I found "V'smachta" to sound less like exploration than what the song would sound like if played by people who didn't play together often enough, as figured out on drugs. This pales, however, next to the songs worth hearing and then worth hearing again--not just the aforementioned delights, but the thoughtful and more exploratory "Welcome to the McDonald's in Dachau," for instance, or the explosive "Debka" where traditional form is transformed six ways to Shabbos.
Even better, this is one of the special explorations of specific time and experience that works. The last two numbers define the parameters of the experience, to some degree: the quiet meditation of the "Bobover Wedding March" is followed by the experimental, yet not experimental the way John Zorn would have explored the same themes, "Finale." Even if I didn't love the name of the album (which I do), I'd have to finger this as Jewish jazz fusion worth listening.
Reviewed by Ari Davidow, 6/21/97
Heavy Shtetl music--LOL'ing here on a Sunday morning! Never heard that one...
Gee, I like Negro spirituals and some Irish folks songs. But I am neither black nor Irish. Does that put me in the same group of bad people that these Germans listening to klezmer are in?
I like anything by Byron and I also favor the Klezmatics.
There's Prokofiev's "Overture on Hebrew Themes" too.
And, as far as the Germans and the Jews go, as an American Jew I have traveled a fair amount in Germany and in the 80s had a German high school student live with us for a week. From what I have seen and heard, the post-WWII generation of Germans have acted quite admirably in educating their citizens about the Holocaust. Berlin is one of my favorite cities in the world--no question. So there was no German-bashing going on from my part.
"Oy to the World" indeed! Too funny (you can always count on Cyborg to add a bit of humor to any thread).
Thanks. I'll have to look that up. I listen to klezmer. I listen to polka music too hehe.
...and since we're on the subject, one of the flats that Beethoven rented in Vienna in the 1790s was near a synagogue. Beethoven heard some of the themes (he was not yet stone deaf) wrote them in notebooks, and some emerged in the first movement (an unusually slow one for a first movement) of his Opus 131 String Quartet in C sharp minor. It is haunting.
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