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thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in
Europe.”
Hitler repeated these themes in subsequent speeches. In September 1942 he
said, “The Jews in Germany once laughed [haben einst … gelacht] at my
prophecies. I do not know if they are still laughing today, or if their laughter has
not already died down. I can only affirm now: their laughter will everywhere die
down.” And in November of that year he said, “I have always been scorned
[ausgelacht] as a prophet. Of those who formerly laughed [die damals lachten],
untold numbers are no longer laughing today, and those who are still laughing
may not be doing it for much longer.”
Hitler was announcing in coded language that the Final Solution was under
way. What makes these speeches especially disturbing from the musical angle
is that they may contain a Wagner reference. The sound of laughter echoes all
through Parsifal. Kundry tells Parsifal of how she mocked Christ’s suffering on
the way of the cross:
I saw—Him—Him—
and—laughed …
And He looked at me!
Otto Weininger, whom Hitler described in his monologues as the “one good
Jew,” said of the laughter in Parsifal, “The laughter of Kundry comes from
Jewry. The metaphysical guilt of the Jews is their grinning at God.” Later, in the
scene of Good Friday Spell, the boy-messiah looks out over a blossoming
meadow and thinks of the flower maidens who tempted him. “I saw them
wither,” he murmurs, “those who once smiled on me [Ich sah sie welken, die
einst mir lachten].”
Hitler’s obsession with Parsifal is well documented. Hans Frank, in his not
always reliable autobiography, reported the following more or less believable
scene, which took place in the Führer’s private train car in 1935:
The record player was pulled out and the Führer picked out some
records. First the Parsifal Prelude, conducted by Muck in Bayreuth. We
sat there in his car in the slowly rolling train, and in our lonely silence
there sounded the sacred tones of the last work of Richard Wagner, his
Master. As they died away, he said pensively: “On Parsifal I am building
my religion—serving God in a solemn way without theological party
bickering. Over a brotherly pedal point of true love, without theatrical
humility and empty formal babbling. Without these disgusting frocks and
hag’s skirts. Only in heroic garb can one serve God.”
Parsifal became the subject of a tug-of-war among the Nazi leaders. Goebbels,
Rosenberg, and Heinrich Himmler all wanted to have the opera removed from
German stages on the grounds that its mystical Christianity traduced the Nazi
spirit. According to a document that has been uncovered by Brigitte Hamann,
Hitler laughed heartily when Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, told
him that Rosenberg had deemed only the second act worthy of performance.
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Parsifal must remain, Hitler said, although directors would have to figure out a
more modern setting for it. Wieland was instructed to “design a timeless Grail
temple.” As Wieland put it, “[Hitler] wants to have Parsifal performed so to
speak against his own Party!!!!”
Back in 1934, Hitler had persuaded Winifred Wagner to hire Alfred Roller to
design a new Parsifal, along the lines of the moody, semiabstract Tristan that
he had so admired in Vienna. The Bayreuth old guard rebelled against Roller’s
shadowy setting, calling it “an orgy from hell.” The author Joachim Köhler has
argued that Roller’s conception of the Grail temple influenced some of the more
grandiose spectacles of Nazi culture—for example, the “dome of light” at the
Party rallies of the thirties and the “great dome” that was to have risen at the
center of Albert Speer’s Berlin. Six years after Hitler’s death, Wieland Wagner
unveiled a minimally furnished, poetically abstract version of Parsifal, which
critics at the time hailed as a renunciation of the “Nazi” Bayreuth. One wonders
how far it really was from Hitler’s dream vision of the opera.
Richard Strauss’s villa in Garmisch is still in the hands of the composer’s family,
and it remains much as he left it. Next to Strauss’s desk is a small portrait of a
Jewish boy by Isidor Kaufman, a painter of shtetl scenes. It belonged to Alice
Strauss’s grandmother Paula Neumann, who in 1942 was deported to the
ghetto turned concentration camp at Theresienstadt, in former Czechoslovakia.
After she had been sent there, Strauss made numerous attempts to have her
released. One day he traveled to the camp by car, announced himself at the
gates with his usual aplomb (“I am the composer Richard Strauss,” he said),
and declared that he wished to take Frau Neumann with him. The guards at the
gate turned him away.
From around 1935 until his death in 1949, Strauss experienced an amazing
creative resurgence. That his return to form should have happened against a
backdrop of genocidal insanity is the kind of paradox that Thomas Mann
addressed in Doctor Faustus. In the case of Strauss, there is no direct evidence
that outer events had much effect on him, consciously or unconsciously. What
does seem likely is that his humiliating dismissal from the Reich Music Chamber
sent him back to first principles. So often in his operas and tone poems, he
used his mighty apparatus to depict a lone figure stripped of worldly illusions,
moving from braggadocio to resignation. In Guntram the hero walks away from
his community into solitude. In Rosenkavalier the Marschallin looks past her
furnishings to a cold, empty space where time is icily ticking down. In Die Frau
ohne Schatten the fairy-tale emperor faces the threat of being turned to stone.
Strauss began his late period with the mythological opera Daphne, in which a
woman escapes her damaged life by turning into a tree. He signposted the
work’s autobiographical significance by making clear allusions to the harmonic
structure and the matic material of Guntram, his painfully unsuccessful first
opera: both works begin in the key of G major and end in F-sharp, and both are
centered on melodies that weave gently around a triad and quicken into
downward-falling triplets.
In a wider sense, Daphne bookended the entire history of music; the story,
taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, recalls the first opera for which music
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survives, Jacopo Peri’s Dafne of 1597-98. Daphne, solitary nymph, daughter of
the river god, prefers the company of nature to the company of men. She
refuses the advances of her childhood friend, the shepherd Leukippos, only to
fall into the arms of Apollo. When Leukippos persists in wooing her, Apollo kills
him in a jealous rage. Daphne, distraught, promises to stand forever over her
friend’s grave, as a “symbol of never-ending love.” The gods, taking pity,
change her into a laurel tree that will stay forever rooted to that spot.
The metamorphosis itself is enacted almost entirely by the orchestra, with
Daphne’s voice returning just before the end to execute wordless arabesques.
Scattered instruments, like trembling leaves, flicker around an F-sharp-major
chord. As if in very distant echo of Ravel or Stravinsky, the orchestra takes up a
delicate layering of rhythms, units of two against units of three, with occasional
asymmetrical bursts of units of five. Even Apollo is lost in wonder at Daphne’s
song. “Are we still gods,” he asks, “or were we overshadowed long ago by
human emotion, obliterated long ago by such gentle greatness?”
The theme of indifference to the world resurfaced in Strauss’s next opera, Die
Liebe der Danae, or The Loves of Danae, in which the composer again lost
himself in Greek mythology, though not without oblique references to his
spiritual state. Jupiter, in the manner of Wagner’s Wotan, eventually comes to
grips with his powerlessness and renounces the dream of love. “The great
restless one bids farewell as twilight falls,” the god sings. He is presumably
speaking also for the composer, who saw himself not only at the end of his life
but at the end of history, the last in the procession of German masters that
began with Bach.
Every time Strauss bade farewell, though, he found himself living a little longer.
While the German Blitzkrieg was moving through Poland, in 1939, he conceived
the peculiarly irrelevant notion of writing a short chamber piece about the art of
opera itself, with the action or lack thereof set in the Paris of the ancien régime.
It was eventually given the title Capriccio. After receiving inadequate ideas from
the hapless Gregor, Strauss decided to write the libretto himself, although he
called in the conductor Clemens Krauss to help.
Once more, a sophisticated, ambivalent, fascinating woman is at the center of
the action. The countess Madeleine has commissioned an opera from the poet
Olivier and the composer Flamand. The two men compete for her favor, and so,
too, do the arts of poetry and music—which is more central to drama? At the
end, the countess looks into a mirror, asking, “Can you help me to find the
ending, the ending for their opera? Is there one that is not trivial?” At this
moment her majordomo walks in to say, “Countess, dinner is served.” A lovely
irony colors Strauss’s setting of that line. “The last words of the opera could not
be more trivial,” Michael Kennedy writes in his Strauss biography. “But they are
set to an unforgettably touching, lyrical phrase, prolonged by the orchestra.”
The countess walks off humming the melody to herself (the orchestra hums for
her), words forgotten.
It is at once touching and unsettling to picture Strauss immersed in the artifice
of Capriccio in the early months of 1941, when German forces were gearing up
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for the invasion of Russia and Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen were set to slaughter
Jews and Slavs in their wake. Touching, because one can sense Strauss’s
need to disappear into a realm of tones. Unsettling, because his work was so at
odds with the surrounding reality. On August 3, 1941, the day that Capriccio
was finished, 682 Jews were killed in Chernovtsy, Romania; 1,500 in Jelgava,
Latvia; and several hundred in Stanislawów, Ukraine. On October 28, 1942, the
day of the opera’s premiere in Munich, the first convoy of Jews from
Theresienstadt arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and 90 percent of them went to
the gas chamber.
The Holocaust accomplished the murder not only of millions of individuals but of
entire schools of composition. The energetically middle-of-the-road, eclectic
style that had prospered in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague between the wars was
effectively wiped out. One of the more prominent victims was the Czech-Jewish
composer Ervín Schulhoff, who died of tuberculosis in the Wülzburg
concentration camp, in August 1942.
Schulhoff’s career neatly maps the early twentieth century: he started off writing
in a Romantic, folk-inflected style, then took up jazz piano and indulged in Dada
provocations (his sardonic Symphonia germanica has a singer shrieking
“Deutschland über alles” while a pianist bangs out dissonances). In the twenties
he produced toughly lyrical chamber music in a Bartókian vein. In the next
decade he embraced socialist realism and went so far as to set the Communist
Manifesto to music. He was on the point of emigrating to the Soviet Union when
the Nazis arrested him. Even in Wülzburg, he continued to compose, sketching
a heroic Eighth Symphony in which the sayings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin would
have pointed the way to victory.
Several other Czech-Jewish composers ended up in the former prison of
Theresienstadt, which had been converted into a “model camp” for wealthier
and more notable Jews. Music flourished there for a time; the great Czech
conductor Karel Ančerl led a performance of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as late
as April 1944. The community of composers included Pavel Haas, a reserved
but eloquent pupil of Janáček’s; Viktor Ullmann, whose aesthetic overlapped in
many ways with that of Alban Berg; Hans Kràsa, who showed the softer-edged
influence of Alexander Zemlinsky and Albert Roussel; and Gideon Klein, who, in
his early twenties, was already developing an individual voice.
The Theresienstadt composers became pawns in a grisly game when Nazi
propagandists decided in 1944 to remodel the camp in preparation for a visit by
the Red Cross. In the pseudo-documentary film Theresienstadt, a cast of
children is seen singing Kràsa’s opera Brundibàr, and Haas takes a bow for his
Study for Strings. It is practically unbearable to see the thin smiles on their
faces. When the project was complete, the Nazis deported eighteen thousand
Theresienstadt prisoners in eleven transports. On October 16, 1944, a train left
for Auschwitz containing Klein, Ullmann, Haas, Kràsa, and the children who had
performed in Brundibàr. All but Klein were killed in the following days. The
young composer was fit enough to survive Josef Mengele’s selection process,
and held on until January the following year.
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Even in Auschwitz, music was still heard. Men’s orchestras formed in 1941 and
1942 and played for the edification of members of the SS. An ambitious female
SS officer decided to found a women’s orchestra in 1943 and assembled a
ragtag band of amateur and professional players. The quality of the women’s
group improved dramatically when the gifted Viennese violinist and conductor
Alma Rosé—Gustav Mahler’s niece—took over as director. As Richard
Newman and Karen Kirtley recount in their biography of Rosé, she succeeded
in putting together a disciplined ensemble of some fifty players and persuaded
the SS to give her supplies, including a baton and a podium. The repertory
included marches, Strauss waltzes, operatic excerpts, the first movement of
Beethoven’s Fifth, parts of Dvořàk’s New World Symphony, and Schumann’s
Träumerei, the last a special favorite of Mengele’s.
“She lived in another world,” a survivor said of Rosé. “Music to her meant her
love and her disappointments, her sorrow and her joys, her eternal longing and
her faith, and this music floated high above the camp atmosphere.” One Polish
cellist recalled how Rosé had violently upbraided her for playing an F-natural
instead of an F-sharp. At the time, the young musician was furious; in
retrospect, she thought that this seemingly futile insistence on perfection had
saved her from insanity. Another time Rosé angrily halted a performance when
she heard SS guards talking too loudly in the background. It was an eerie echo
of her uncle’s remonstrations of inattentive audiences in Vienna.
Alma Rosé fell ill in April 1944, apparently of botulism. She died quickly, despite
Mengele’s apparently sincere attempts to revive her. Many of her musicians
survived, thanks in large measure to the special status that their conductor had
obtained for them. Paula Neumann, Alice Strauss’s grandmother, was not so
lucky. One day the Strauss family received a package containing her death
certificate; “spotted fever” was given as the cause of death, although in all
probability she died in Auschwitz. The package also contained Isidor Kaufman’s
portrait of the Jewish boy, which Strauss hung next to his desk.
Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, an allegorical portrait of prewar
Europe in the guise of a mountaintop sanatorium called the Berghof, has a
scene in which Hans Castorp, the feckless young hero, falls in love with a
phonograph and hears in its songs a “sympathy for death.” Castorp goes on to
fantasize about using a simple song to conquer the world: “One might even
found whole empires upon it, earthly, all-too-earthly empires, very coarse, very
progressive, and not in the least nostalgic.” The young man appoints himself the
operator of the gramophone, pitoting his fellow inmates through the wonders of
the record library. Both Hitler and Stalin liked to hold listening parties of the
Magic Mountain kind. Stalin had a good American gramophone in his dacha
and, according to an eyewitness, “changed the discs and entertained the
guests.” It was much the same with Hitler, who assembled an extensive record
collection at his Berchtesgaden retreat—the Berghof—and subjected his guests
to long disquisitions with phonographic accompaniment.
Typically, the evenings would revolve around Wagner excerpts, songs of
Strauss and Hugo Wolf, and, of course, melodies by Lehàr, whom Shostakovich
had quoted mockingly in the Leningrad Symphony. The guests might hear, out
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of thousands of discs on hand, Karl Muck conducting Parsifal, Heinrich
Schlusnus singing Strauss’s “Heimliche Aufforderung,” or Hermann Abendroth’s
recording of Sibelius’s Finlandia. (The catalog of the Berghof record library fills
three thick red-brown volumes; they can be seen at the Library of Congress.)
Martin Bormann stood watch over the gramophone itself. Hitler habitually gave
amateur music-appreciation lectures about each disc as it played, informing his
captive audience that “Bruckner was the greatest organist of his time,” that
“Mozart was buried in a mass grave,” that “Tristan is surely [Wagner’s] greatest
work. We have the love of Mathilde Wesendonck to thank for it.”
A special warmth came over Hitler when Tristan appeared on the playlist. His
mind would drift back to the Vienna of the prewar period. Heinrich Hoffmann, in
his memoir Hitler Was My Friend, recalled one fireside monologue: “‘I would
scrape and save every farthing,’ he would tell us, gazing with a far-away look
into the leaping flames, ‘to get myself a seat in “the Gods” at the Imperial
Opera. And the gala performances! What a superb spectacle of pomp and
magnificence it was, to watch the members of the Imperial family arriving, and
to see the Grand Dukes in their glittering gold uniforms and all the great ladies,
adorned with their scintillating diadems, stepping out of their carriages!’”
Party officials began to entertain the notion that Hitler was losing his mind. “I
had the impression that he had gone crazy in ’43,” Baldur von Schirach said
during the period of Nuremberg trials. “I had that impression in ’42,” Hans
Fritzsche replied. As the eastern front began to collapse, Hitler worked to
perfect a music policy that no longer had meaning. One of his initiatives was to
ship wounded soldiers to Bayreuth, so they could have their own Wagner
epiphanies. The Führer also studied plans for a Bruckner Orchestra in Linz and
for a Bruckner festival that would rival Bayreuth in magnitude. In the weeks
following the Normandy invasion, Hitler feared for the safety of Furtwängler, his
favorite conductor, and ordered that a bunker be built to protect him from
bombs. Furtwängler, who was staying in a castle outside Berlin, told Hitler that
such precautions were unnecessary. So workers were dispatched to the
conductor’s Berlin home to reinforce the cellar with bricks and beams.
Hitler also fretted over Strauss, who had committed a new outrage in 1943.
When the local Garmisch government instructed Strauss to give over parts of
his villa to evacuees and wounded soldiers, the composer replied that he
wanted no strangers in his house. “No soldier needs to fall on my account,” he
supposedly said. “I did not want this war, it is nothing to do with me.” He
appealed to Hitler for assistance. “My achievements as composer and
conductor,” he wrote, “were last known to you, my Führer, in Bayreuth, where I
had the honor of meeting you during Parsifal.” Perhaps Strauss was trying to
remind Hitler of his supposed attendance at Salome in Graz. Hitler was
unmoved. The next day he ruled that Strauss would have to accommodate the
refugees and that Nazi officials should have nothing more to do with him. When
it came time to mark the composer’s eightieth birthday, in June 1944, Hitler and
Goebbels were at first inclined to snub him, but they relented under pressure
from Furtwängler, who advised them, absurdly, that international opinion might
turn against Germany if Strauss’s birthday were ignored. Before the Garmisch
fiasco, Hitler had intended to give the composer a new Mercedes along with a
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ration card for one thousand liters of fuel. Now he sent only a curt telegram.
Goebbels mailed off a copy of Houdon’s bust of Gluck.
Both Nazi officials and anti-Nazi émigrés made the same complaint about
Strauss—that he acted like “a total bystander,” in the words of a Reich Culture
Chamber official. “His music, in particular his songs, is certainly wonderful,”
Hitler apparently said to Goebbels, “but his character is simply miserable.” In an
angrier mood, Hitler once announced to Speer that Strauss was “completely
second-rate.” Perhaps it is the ultimate insult to have one’s morals impugned by
Hitler, although the consternation that Strauss continuously created in the upper
reaches of the Nazi hierarchy points up something stubborn and irreducible in
his personality. He was a quantity that could not be controlled and could not be
removed.
In the summer of 1944, Strauss began to plan a large-scale piece for string
ensemble in the nature of a funeral oration or lamentation. It had been decades
since he had written a major instrumental work; his last truly significant effort in
that line had been the Alpine Symphony, composed in the wake of Mahler’s
death. The new piece would be called Metamorphosen—another homage to
Ovid. Strauss had in mind the process by which souls revert from one state to
another—though, as the scholar Timothy Jackson has suggested, the
transformation may be a negative one, in which things devolve to their
primordial state. The composer also took inspiration from a short poem by
Goethe, whose complete works he read from beginning to end in his last years:
No one can know himself,
Detach from his self,
Yet he tries to become every day
What is finally clear from the outside,
What he is and what he was,
What he can and what he may.
Strauss sketched a choral work based on Goethe’s text, and, as Jackson
discovered, some of that material went into Metamorphosen. The composer
was musing in some deep way on the course of his life, perhaps questioning the
philosophy of individualism that had long guided him.
Metamorphosen, scored for twenty-three strings, begins with consecutive
chords of E minor, A-flat major, B-flat major, and A major, anchored on a
descending chromatic line. Dusky and doleful, the harmonies run through
eleven of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale in just two bars, as if to
acknowledge that Schoenberg might not have been so crazy after all.
Contrapuntal lines intertwine like kudzu on a ruined mansion. As the movement
unfolds, the music tries to settle into a more relaxed, lyrical voice, but at regular
intervals a kind of drainage occurs and a Tristan mood of wounded desperation
resumes. At a dramatic moment toward the end, most of the instruments drop
out, leaving a sibilant G in the upper violas and cellos. The effect recalls the
climax of the Adagio of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, when the ensemble falls
away to expose a unison C-flat high in the violins. Strauss’s high cry seems
prepared to serve as a dramatic leading note to a brighter tonal region—
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something akin to Mahler’s beatific resignation. Instead, it gravitates implacably
to the deathly C minor that has been sounding throughout.
In the final section a new element enters: a quotation from the funeral march of
Beethoven’s Eroica. As the story goes, Beethoven had planned to dedicate the
Eroica to Napoleon, but when Napoleon crowned himself emperor the
composer crossed out the dedication and wrote instead, “To the memory of a
great man.” It has long been thought that Strauss was saying the same about
Hitler, burying a man in whom he once believed. In light of the hidden citation of
Goethe’s line “No one can know himself,” it is more likely that the hero being
laid to rest is Strauss himself. There are anguished dissonances as Strauss’s
own funereal anthem falls in and out of sync with Beethoven’s. Having
seemingly reached bottom, it goes two more long steps down—a low G, then an
even lower C. It is like the sunrise fanfare of Thus Spake Zarathustra moving in
retrograde, the harmonic series rewinding to the fundamental. There is no “light
in the night,” only night.
Strauss finished Metamorphosen on April 12, 1945. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
died the same day. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, vaguely similar in tone
to the music that Strauss had just composed, played on American radio. That
afternoon in the ruins of Berlin, the Berlin Philharmonic presented an
impeccably Hitlerish program that included Beethoven’s Violin Concerto,
Bruckner’s Romantic Symphony, and the Immolation Scene from
Götterdämmerung. After the concert, members of the Hitler Youth distributed
cyanide capsules to the audience, or so the rumor went. Hitler marked his fifty-
sixth birthday on April 20. Ten days later, he shot himself in the mouth. In
accordance with his final instructions, the body was incinerated alongside that
of Eva Braun.
Hitler possibly envisaged his immolation as a reprise of that final scene of the
Ring, in which Brünnhilde builds a pyre for Siegfried and rides into the flames.
Or he may have hoped to reenact the lovedeath of Tristan—whose music, he
once told his secretary, he wished to hear as he died. Walther Funk thought that
Hitler had modeled the scorched-earth policy of the regime’s last phase on
Wagner’s grand finale: “Everything had to go down in ruins with Hitler himself,
as a sort of false Götterdämmerung.” Such an extravagant gesture would have
fulfilled the prophecy of Walter Benjamin, who wrote that fascist humanity would
“experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.” But there is
no evidence that the drug-addled Führer was thinking about Wagner or listening
to music in the last days and hours of his life. Eyewitness reports suggest that
the grim ceremony in the bombed-out Chancellery garden—two gasolinesoaked
corpses burning fitfully, the one intact, the other with its skull caved in—was
something other than a work of art.
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Part III
1945–2000
We live in a time I think not of
mainstream, but of many streams, or even,
if you insist upon a river of time, that we
have come to delta, maybe even beyond
delta to an ocean which is going back
to the skies.
—JOHN CAGE, KPFA RADIO, 1992
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ZERO HOUR
The U.S. Army and German Music, 1945–1949
On April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s suicide, “zero hour” in modern German
history, the 103rd Infantry and Tenth Armored divisions of the U.S. Army took
possession of the Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which the war had
hardly touched. Two hundred Allied bombers had been poised to lay waste to
the town and its environs, but the strike was called off at the behest of a
surrendering German officer.
Early in the morning a security detachment turned in to the driveway of a
Garmisch villa, intending to use it as a command post. When the senior officer,
Lieutenant Milton Weiss, went inside the house, an old man came downstairs to
meet him. “I am Richard Strauss,” he said, “the composer of Rosenkavalier and
Salome.” Strauss studied the soldier’s face for signs of sympathy. Weiss, who
had played piano at Jewish resorts in the Catskills, nodded his head in
recognition. Strauss went on to recount his experiences in the war, pointedly
mentioning the tribulations of his Jewish relatives. Weiss chose to install his
post elsewhere.
At 11:00 a.m. on the same day, a squad of jeeps came up the drive, these led
by Major John Kramers, of the 103rd Infantry Division’s military-government
branch. Kramers told the family that they had fifteen minutes to evacuate.
Strauss walked out to the major’s jeep, holding documents that declared him to
be an honorary citizen of Morgantown, West Virginia, together with part of the
manuscript of Rosenkavalier. “I am Richard Strauss, the composer,” he said.
Kramers’s face lit up; he was a Strauss fan. An “Off Limits” sign was placed on
the lawn.
In the days that followed, Strauss posed for photographs, played the
Rosenkavalier waltzes on the piano, and smiled bemusedly as soldiers
inspected his statue of Beethoven and asked who it was. “If they ask one more
time,” he muttered, “I’m telling them it’s Hitler’s father.”
All over Europe, young veterans were emerging from the rubble of the war into
adulthood. Among them were several future leaders of the postwar musical
scene, and they would be indelibly marked by what they had experienced in
adolescence. Karlheinz Stockhausen was the son of a spiritually tortured Nazi
Party member who went to the eastern front and never returned. His mother
was confined for many years to a sanatorium, then killed in the Nazi euthanasia
program. By the age of sixteen, Stockhausen was working in a mobile hospital
behind the western front, where he tried to revive soldiers who had fallen victim
to Allied incendiary bombs. “I would try to find an opening in the mouth area for
a straw,” he recalled, “in order to pour some liquid into these men, whose
bodies were still moving, but there was only a yellow ball-like mass where the