Goethe and Ghetto, Viktor Ullmann in Theresienstadt, a film on culture and barbarism. Produced 1995 (Hade premiär 18 aug. 2023)
Theresienstadt is probably the most brutal and most thought-provoking paradox of our times. Cultural freedom under the auspices of barbarism. Mozart inside the walls, Auschwitz outside. Essentially this paradox was of course illusory. Barbarism was in total control. Culture was fighting on an imaginary battle field.
The cultural creativity that in Theresienstadt was not only permitted, but at one stage actively encouraged by the Nazi regime, was from the very beginning a grotesque but fully calculated step in the annihilation scheme of barbarism.
As the war progressed Theresienstadt gained strategic importance as a Nazi propaganda scene, a way to lull an increasingly suspicious world to believe that this indeed was ”the final solution” to the Jewish problem. As late as in the summer of 1944 a visiting delegation from the Red Cross let itself believe what it was made to see.
Preparing the scene for a Nazi propaganda film to be shot in Theresienstadt during the same time, the disturbing sight of the weak and the sick was conveniently eliminated through transports to ”the East”, the children were fed extra rations, the jazz orchestra was dressed up in white shirts with decorative David stars and the filmed concerts attended by a somewhat lean but proper and attentive audience.
A few months later most of the film’s ”actors” had been evacuated and gassed to death. To barbarism Theresienstadt was no paradox at all, only a means to murder and annihilation. Music and art as instruments of manipulation and deception. To the idea of æsthetical culture, however, Theresienstadt was the most cruel of deceits and the biggest of challenges.
The outburst of cultural creativity that here was brought to occur, meant to the people who participated in it and were touched by it , an invaluable link to meaning and hope.
In a ghetto where you, in spite of the most dreadful material and human conditions, could perform Verdi’s Requiem (even if the choir from time to time was deported and killed and had to be replaced), where you could attend world class chamber music concerts, where ”Jewish” music was allowed and developed, where you could play jazz and perform cabarets, where the visual arts flourished, where secret dreams were enshrined in children’s drawings and notes, barbarism could simply not prevail.
Every newly written sonata, every new song cycle, every new performance of a string quartet or the staging of a newly written opera, were investments in a time beyond Theresienstadt. Had the victims known that there was no such time, maybe everything would have been different. The flourishing of culture in Theresienstadt was ultimately possible because the deceit was successful, because the victims did not know what was planned for them.
They believed, or very much wished to believe, that culture not only strengthened themselves but also weakened barbarism. They continued to believe when they should have known not to, when the frequent transports to Auschwitz in the fall of 1944 tore orchestras, choirs and chamber groups apart, canceled rehearsed operas, terminated half-finished lectures, silenced jazz bands and cabarets. Culture in Theresienstadt was in this sense a real paradox. It flourished as if barbarism did not exist. It flourished because barbarism did exist.