Abstract

What role did music play in the death-throes of the Reich? What did the orchestras of the Reich perform in the latter stages of the war? Examining dialogues from the bunker in the expiring days of the Reich, one finds oneself in the rhetoric of Wagner, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The leitmotif of this prolonged “heroic” exit is a wild case of “noblesse;” and some thousands obliged indeed. This essay will illuminate the use of music as means to support the darker and more sinister ideogram of self-punishment and purification.

Read Panayiotis Demopoulos’s complete essay on our website.

Excerpts from the Essay:

On April 11th 1945, as the Red Army fast-approached Berlin, the Berlin Philharmonic gave what might have been its last concert before the end of the war. Albert Speer, who had intervened to save members of the Orchestra from their senseless drafting into the Volksturm, organized a final concert, entitled  Konzert für Minister Speer in the Berlin Beethoven Haal, still curiously standing amidst the city’s rubble.

The programme for the concert commenced with the final scene from Wagner’s  Götterdämmerung:

…Grane my steed. I greet you.  
Do you know my friend where I shall lead you?  
In that radiant fire lies your master, Siegfried, my blessed hero.
Are you neighing happily because you are following your friend?  
Are you drawn to him in the laughing flames?

Hence, Valhalla, home of the Gods was consumed in fire. The metaphorical question is obvious: were the German people ‘neighing happily’ in those ‘radiant fires’? This author uses his very limited life experience to conclude that they were not. Still, as Michael Geyer describes very astutely “…sacrifice in order to maintain community was a self-evident virtue in catastrophe…”  And ‘the war’, or to be more accurate the destruction of Berlin and its people, went on.

According to most sources as well as popular myth, Speer engineered a move for the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic to the relative peace of Bayreuth, but they chose to remain with their Berliner audiences until the end of the war. The Orchestra’s final concerts were given in candlelight, under bombing and with Hitler Jugend children offering the exiting members of the audience cyanide capsules for private use, adding to the tragic and conclusive atmosphere of the whole affair.

One cannot help but feel that if present in those concerts, any German Romanticism aficionado might find the confusing air of cynicism and resignation contagious if not seductive—a prescribed death is often both the bringer of despair and of irresistible primordial and sensual tensions.

It is, nonetheless difficult to ascertain the audience’s experience, especially the military officers’ emotional response to the music. After all, the people of Berlin, suffering greatly as they were in those last months of the war, might have found the lush Wagnerian orchestral landscape extremely poignant in the face of defeat and the accompanying humiliation, pillaging and rape which they feared it would bring.

The Orchestra went on to give two more concerts, in which the main works were—fittingly—the Deutsches Requiem by J. Brahms and  Tod und Verklarung by J. Strauss. It becomes quite clear from the choice of repertoire that the Orchestra was now playing a funeral march for the entire nation. This neurosis of being unable to see an alternative future in which the German nation might exist outside of final victory, is best reflected at the infanticide that took place in the bunker by Magda Goebbels.

And there was music there too, perhaps the only music that might stop the senseless killing. According to Traudl Junge the Goebbels’ children sang for Hitler, who was very pleased to hear their song. This innocent choir of young voices was soon murdered by its very mother, in the bunker, just before the mother herself committed suicide. There is no academic phrasing suitable enough to describe the incomprehensibility of how mankind can achieve this nonsense, especially at this high level of leadership.

Read Panayiotis Demopoulos’s complete essay on our website.

In the last 4 months of the war, more than 1,500,000 Germans, including hundreds of thousands of civilians, lost their lives in an increasingly vain war effort. Music was a tool in encouraging the German people to continue fighting. Charles Whiting is also convinced that musical fantasies had taken over Hitler’s psyche when he describes why this national suicide occurred:

When the end came for Hitler, he staged his own  Götterdämmerung in his Berlin bunker. He refused to surrender, preferring to take of his own life over an unheroic end. By his absolute refusal to even consider capitulation, he ensured vast, horrible destruction of lives and property long after these losses could have had any possible affect upon the outcome of the war. Hitler lived out his fantasy to the end; to the fullest; precipitating the realization of his favorite operatic scene, the final destruction of the gods and Valhalla.

One would have to add the pleasure of punishment to this emotional struggle. Hitler first spoke of ‘traitors’ and ‘weaklings’ in  Mein Kampf. His Generals adopted this leitmotif and preached it to the end: “For us there is no higher law and no more sacred duty than to fight to the last breath for the freedom of our people, that we want to rid ourselves of everything soft and disloyal.” said Alfred Jodl on November 7th, 1942 to the Volksturm.

In this light, the last few days of the Russian advance were a sort of execution of the weaker, more treacherous elements of German society. By that point, this might not be merely acceptable, but desirable. Otherwise put, Hitler himself dreamed and wished for his people that what they had failed to become—an army of suicidal faithful—would one day come to be. He explained in his  Political Testament:

May it become, at some future time, part of the code of honor of the German officer, as it is already in our Navy, that the surrender of a district or of a town is impossible, and that the leaders here above all must march ahead as shining examples, faithfully fulfilling their duty unto death.

Duty, being the operative word. There were two oaths for the military and the civil service of which the former read: “I swear by God this sacred oath that to the Leader of the German empire and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces, I shall render unconditional obedience and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath.”.

Therefore, it is not conjecture, but a blatant reality that for Hitler duty and death were the same thing by this stage of the war, which applied for all men between the ages of 16 and 60  (Volksturm). In this final act, not even the Tristan chord might confer some magical turn of events. The role of music was plainly that of a muffled, funeral drum that led to the guillotine.

Read Panayiotis Demopoulos’s complete essay on our website.

Gregory Lobo: “The thing about the nation is that while we’ve had a certain progress demystifying other essential ideas, like race and sex/gender, and even (dis)ability, we don’t seem to have affected the national mind in any way whatsoever. Both left and right — and center — cannot stop dreaming of the nation.”

Gregory Lobo’s complete essay appears on our website.

Lobo presents his concept of nationism, which he distinguishes from nationalism. Nationalism is a “superficial at most reflexive affirmation of national identity and pride.” Whereas nationism, Lobo says, should be understood as a “deeper, fundamental belief in the nation as such;” as a “historical force and entity in its own right.”

Nations are the mother of us all. Like fish, we are immersed in oceans called nations, barely noticing them. In most countries, the idea of the nation is taken for granted. In Colombia, however, according to Lobo, the image of a national community is “for the most part absent,” and needs to be constructed.

Lobo’s essay focuses on a concerted, spectacular public relations campaign that occurred in Colombia. He discusses three television commercials, part of the “Heroes really do exist in Colombia” campaign (a video appears here), which also included billboards and print media. These commercials sought to “conjure up the image of the nation out of (almost) nothing.”

Examining the relationship between the idea of the nation and the soldier’s willingness to kill and die, Lobo critiques Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities (1983/1996). While theoretically speaking, nations might be imagined, “no one who actually thinks of himself as a national thinks he is merely imagining it.” Rather, nations are recognized simply as “brute facts.”

Why would so many millions kill and die for such an idea? Lobo recalls the Battle of Valmy of 1792, which saw a large but disorderly force of French national conscripts and professional soldiers send their formidable Prussian adversaries packing, with a conviction embodied in the battle cry, “Vive la nation!”

But to what were they referring? These soldiers may well have been inspired by Abbé de Sieyès’ “What is the Third Estate?” (1789):

The Nation exists before all things and is the origin of all. Its will is always legal, it is the law itself…Nations on earth must be conceived as individuals outside the social bond, or as is said, in the state of nature. The exercise of their will is free and independent of all civil forms. Existing only in the natural order, their will, to have its full effect, only needs to possess the natural characteristics of a will. In whatever manner a nation wills, it suffices that it does will; all forms are valid and its will is always the supreme law.

This description of the nation, Lobo says, is “redolent with grandeur,” and might—did—inspire some people to embrace homicide and self-sacrifice, believing that “such a marvel, such a monstrosity, actually existed,” and that they were a “constituent and in some sense equal part of it.”

It may be well and good for a social scientist to understand the nation as an imagined community, but “how many people would kill and die for such a thing?” Lobo suggests that by reflecting on the words of Sieyès, as well as those of Ernst Renan (in “What is a Nation?” 1882) and Thucydides (in his “Funeral Oration”), we will begin to get a sense of what women and men think about when they think about the nation. It is “something glorious, something great, and therefore something compelling.”

Yes—without saying precisely what a nation is—certainly an essential element is that it is conceived as something “great and glorious.” Everyone wants to link themselves to these grand entities: partake of their greatness and glory. Each national tends to believe that the entity with which he or she identifies is the “greatest country in the world.”

However, what if one’s country isn’t great? Of course, Lobo says, Colombia is recognized as a nation, and Colombians are quick to invoke their national pride. But in fact there is little social solidarity in Colombia. “A heroic past, great men, glory,” is the social capital, according to Renan, upon which one bases a national idea. Yet in Colombia “these things are lacking.” Though Spanish rule ended almost two centuries ago, independence has “less consisted in heroism, greatness and glory than in more or less endless civil wars, territorial loss, and oligarchic domination, right up to the present day.”

Renan suggests that “suffering in common” gives rise to the “spiritual family” that is the nation. Colombians have suffered, Lobo says, but the problem is that this suffering has not been in the sense used by Renan: against a unifying outsider. Rather, Colombians have suffered each other and waged war against themselves, producing a history of violence, recrimination and revenge, and centrifugal social forces, unmitigated by the opportunity to construct a political order that would “cohere the various competing interests in the country.”

How to create a nation—one worth killing and dying for? Lobo presents and discusses several television commercials, part of the “Heroes really do exist in Colombia” campaign (“Los Heroes en Colombia Si Existen,” which may be viewed here). The purpose of these commercials is to convince soldiers and civilians in Colombia that “killing and dying was for something.”

One commercial shows the face of a male soldier addressing the audience. “What’s up?” he asks. “It’s good to talk to you on nights like this.” All the while, his eyes dart from the viewer to somewhere off-screen, suggesting an attentive concern for potential intruders, enemies. A whole platoon seems to be out there, “strangers to us, yet ready to die for me, the viewer.” Dramatic music now dominates the soundtrack, and the affirmation appears on the screen: “Heroes really do exist in Colombia.” Before the fade to black, the insignia of the Colombian Army appears front and center on the screen.

In another ad, it seems as if we are creeping up on a soldier, but when he turns quickly and sees us, he is not surprised. He can clearly distinguish between “people like us—his constituency—and his targets.” He sees us, then, almost as if expecting us, and asks, “How is everything? How’s your family? How are you doing?”

“They’ve told me you’re doing well,” he says to us, as we see his comrades searching the terrain, weapons aimed, looking for the enemy. “They’re out there looking for bad guys to kill,” the soldier says. With little mirth, manifesting little enthusiasm but quite a bit of determination, he looks straight at us and declares, “I’m taking care of you guys,” like a harried parent might tell an ungrateful child.

Then, changing the emphasis, he assures me, the individual viewer, “I am carrying you, right here,” and he positions his right hand over his heart, giving his chest a couple of soft strikes. Suddenly we’re right up in his face, and he continues: “You know what? Me? I don’t know you.” He is shaking his head, his lips pull into a smile, but with eyes turned down. There’s a sadness, a sort of unrequitedness. Then, nodding, he finishes: “But I’m ready to give my life for you.”

Lobo focuses on these commercials as examples of the “spectacular attempt to conjure up the moral conscience — that nation about which Renan speaks.” He contends that these commercials are an attempt to make sense of the war in Colombia, “by producing a nation, something beyond me, that is worth all of me, and more than me.” They attempt to “transpose or transform the empirical community, one that is riven by suspicion and indifference, into a cosmic or spiritual one.” The nation must be called into existence, for “if not the nation, then what? Under what other pretext can a huge military force be recruited, financed and put into action other than the pretext of the nation?”

How do the commercials help produce the nation? The clear, unambiguous message of each is that heroes do in fact, really exist in Colombia. The need to insist on the existence of heroes stems from the “absence of the sort of history — understood as a national history — that would actually have produced them.” What’s more, the very rhetoric of the commercials produces not only heroes but, by logical necessity, “the (great) nation of which they would be heroes: if there are really heroes, there must really be a nation.”

According to this formulation, the idea of the hero must exist prior to the idea of the nation. In order for a nation to exist, there must be someone willing to die for us. The existence of human beings who are willing to die — to sacrifice their lives — gives rise to the idea of the nation (see Marvin and Ingle, 1999).

With regards,
Richard Koenigsberg, Ph.D
Director, Library of Social Science
rak@libraryofsocialscience.com

Notes on Gregory Lobo’s lecture at Northern Michigan University, “Charismatic Nation.”
To view a video of the lecture, click here.

The nation isn’t anything in the world. It’s a signifier — a concept. It has no corresponding referent in the material world. The immaterial referent is the impossible, idealized community that can never exist in the real world. “The nation” conjures up a reality — conjures away the chaos of existence. The nation is an ideology or discourse with a job to do: the symbolic formulation of reality.

The nation is somewhere else: everywhere and nowhere at the same time: ordering reality. The nation is sovereign. Nationalism: the government of nobody. A supernatural being. The nation comes first. Nationalism: the origin of all. Nations are outside the social bond. The nation wills. It’s will is the supreme will.

The nation — like god — is the origin of all things — super-natural: divine. The nation is pre-political: natural, before construction. There are no limits to the sovereignty of the nation. The nation is unbound: has charisma. It is transcendental, collective individual: thy will be done. If one lays claim to the nation, one has a voice. One is given a voice. Can get away with just about anything.

Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life: Its Measure and Form By Karl Binding (Author), Alfred Hoche (Author), Cristina Modak (Translator)Publisher: Suzeteo Enterprises
Format: Paperback
Published: 1920
ISBN-10: 1936830507
Language: English
Pages: 120

For information on purchasing this book through Amazon, click here.

Many people do not realize that the Germans were methodically killing fellow Germans before they were killing Jews, gypsies, and dissidents. ‘Action T4’ was a medical program that quietly whisked disabled and mentally ill people for extermination. Germans of all ages were targeted. Hundreds of thousands received ‘treatment.’ Fewer people know that the philosophical foundations for the Nazi actions were laid many years earlier, even before the National Socialist party was created.

In a sober, academic discussion, professors Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche argued that there were ‘lives unworthy of life’ and for the good of society, and indeed, out of compassion for the worthless individuals, such people could be ethically killed. Binding and Hoche’s book was a turning point in German culture and served as a catalyst for the T4 program, which itself was a precursor to the Holocaust.

Perhaps the most significant passage in the history of the twentieth century—shaping the Holocaust and Second World War—appeared in 1920, from Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding:

This passage—quoted repeatedly by historians of Nazism—provided the ideological foundation of the “Euthanasia Program” that took hold in Germany in 1939. Two eminent academics—law Professor Alfred Hoche and psychiatrist Karl Bending— proposed that the state was justified in killing “life unworthy of life.”

The authors ask us to reflect upon a “battlefield strewn with thousands of dead youths,” and to compare this scene with “our mental hospitals with their caring for their living inmates.” Upon making this comparison, one will be “deeply shaken by the strident clash” between the sacrifice of the “finest flower of humanity,” on the one hand, and the “meticulous care” shown to existences which are “absolutely worthless,” on the other.

This passage contains the germ of a critique of the First World War. While the authors do not ask, “Why were millions of young German men slaughtered on the battlefield?” they pose the question, “Why were the best, most vital people (young German men) treated so miserably by the nation, while the least valuable people (incurable mental patients) are treated so well?”

The authors present their proposal for euthanasia—the destruction of life unworthy of life—based on a comparison of the two cases: “If the state is willing to kill its best people—healthy young men who contribute significantly to society without compunction or guilt, why should the state hesitate to take the lives of people who make no contribution, indeed are burdensome to society?”

The Nazi euthanasia movement had little or nothing to do with genetics or social Darwinism. Rather, it arose out of the incipient perception of what could not be uttered: that the state already was involved in a project of mass-murder. If the state killed its best and healthiest human beings (that presumably contributed substantially to society), why could it not also kill the worst or least healthy human beings (who were incapable of contributing to society)?

The Trauma of the First World War

Directly below are figures for German casualties in the First World War (reported by Robert Whalen, 1984).

Dead: 2,037,000
Wounded: 4,300,000
Missing or Prisoner: 974,977
TOTAL: 7,311,977

The First World War lasted from July 28, 1914, to November 11, 1918, four years, three months and 14 days—or 1567 days. This comes out to 4666 German casualties—or 1300 German soldiers killed—each day.

In the Iraq war, 2003-2012, approximately 5000 American soldiers died in ten years. An equivalent number of German soldiers died every three days during the First World War; and this number of deaths continued for over four years. It is nearly impossible to grasp this event—the quantity of slaughter—or to imagine the impact of the First World War on the German people.

The magnitude of the trauma is suggested in the following address presented at a convention in Berlin by a disabled veteran (cited in Whalen):

A gash goes through all our lives, and that gash is the war. With a brutal hand it has torn our lives in two. Everyone here experienced it differently, but everyone sensed the demonic quality of the war. It was like some elemental catastrophe, I don’t know how else to say it, which threw the entire planet into torment.

We know and feel, that the war didn’t only have external effects. It did not just change the map of the world, it changed the soul of human beings. We ourselves cannot entirely sense the enormous impact of the war on the human spirit, because we were part of it…we who have lived through this inferno can never be free from it. It has affected all our lives.

Of course, there were protests toward the end of and after the war—and Germany was on the brink of revolution. Finally, however, patriotism, nationalism—belief in one’s country—won out. Despite the havoc and destruction wreaked upon people by their own nation, it was difficult for most people to say what was true: that the German government had been responsible for killing and mutilating millions of young men.

If the Nation Can Kill Its Best Citizens, Why Can’t It Kill Its Worst?

 Adolf Hitler came to embody German patriotism or nationalism—refusing to critique Germany (and therefore to critique war). Though death had “snatched so many dear comrades and friends from our ranks,” Hitler averred in Mein Kampf, it would have been “a sin to complain” because, after all, were they not “dying for Germany”?

Because death has occurred in the name of one’s beloved nation, it is a “sin to complain.” No matter the extent of suffering that one’s nation has caused, Hitler—like many others—refuses to say that his country is destructive, or evil; to contemplate abandoning her.

Like Hitler, Hoche and Binding are unable to critique Germany directly, posing simple questions like: “Why did my nation sacrificed the finest flower of humanity?”  “Why—during the First World War—was the battlefield strewn with thousands of dead youths?” They refuse to acknowledge the destruction wrought by their nation. Rather, they perform an oblique, indirect critique by comparing the care provided for soldiers with the care provided for mental patients. Why are the most valuable lives treated so wastefully, while the state provides excellent care for lives that are worthless?

Here lay the origins of the ideology of mass murder—arising from the wreckage of the First World War. Unable to pose the question, “Why did our nation kill its healthiest or best citizens?” Hoche and Binding declared, “If our nation can kill its healthiest or best people, why can it not also kill its unhealthiest or worst people?”

About the AuthorAkio Kimura is Professor at Kitami Institute of Technology. He received an M.A. from Sophia University (Tokyo) and another M.A. and a Ph.D. from Drew University (New Jersey). He is the author of Faulkner and Oe: The Self-Critical Imagination (University Press of America, 2007), and articles on Japanese and American literature, and on genocide, including “Genocide and the Modern Mind: Intention and Structure” (Journal of Genocide Research 5.3 [2003]).Faulkner and Oe: The Self-Critical ImaginationAuthor: Akio Kimura

Publisher: U. Press of America
Format: Paperback
Published on: 2007
ISBN-10: 0761836632
Language: English
Pages: 208

For information on purchasing this book through Amazon, click here.

Akio Kimura expertly investigates Oe’s feminist turn in his novels in the 1980s as a criticism of this “I” as an authoritarian first-person narrator. Oe considers this concept to be a disruptive reflection of Japanese society’s established order. Oe’s response to such a disruption is the introduction of a series of metaphors utilized in order to represent Faulkner’s individualism and the subsequent deconstruction of Japanese autocracy. Drawing on Kofman, Irigaray, and Derrida, this book explores how Faulkner’s individualism inspires Oe to juxtapose the Japanese authoritarian and the Faulknerian self-critical.

A Note from the Editors at Library of Social Science:

Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) One of the most significant Japanese authors post WW II, Mishima was a novelist, playwright and film director. He wrote about Japan’s imperial past, its heroic ideals, samurai traditions and the honor of dying for one’s country. On November 25, 1970 – following a failed coup to restore the Emperor power – Mishima killed himself following the ritual of Seppuku or disembowelment performed in public.

Hirohito (1901-1989) Emperor of Japan from 1926 to 1989. There has been debate about his role during Japan military expansion from the 1930s to 1945 and about his willingness or opposition to militarist elements of his government. After 1945, Hirohito was not prosecuted for war crimes. His imperial status changed dramatically in 1946 when he renounced the traditional divine status.

Read Akio Kimura’s complete essay on our website.

Please leave your reflections and commentary below.

In Japan, Akio Kimura explains, there were two views of the emperor’s divinity during the Second World War. According to one, the Emperor was a God: the absolute and transcendental being. The second reduced the emperor to a demigod in Shinto’s polytheistic tradition, or even denied the emperor’s divinity entirely. Mishima Yukio embraced the idea of the Emperor as God.

Many Japanese, Kimura says, were shocked when Hirohito renounced his divinity after the war—because they felt they had been “deprived of the cause of war.” Mishima spoke for “those who died for the emperor believing he was God.” By killing himself, Mishima “reenacted the sacrificial death for the emperor during World War II,” and by doing so criticized Emperor Hirohito for “betraying those who had died for him believing in his divinity.” With his spectacular suicide, Mishima sought to “remind the postwar Japanese of what they had believed in during the war.”

Just as Hitler expected every German to sacrifice his life for the country, so the Japanese military government, Kimura says, “expected every Japanese to sacrifice their lives for their country” under the slogan, “ichioku sogyokusai,” which means “one hundred million broken jewels.” The people were encouraged to “keep fighting to the death.”

Many Japanese died while the government hesitated to surrender, among them the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who were sacrificed “not so much for the country as for the emperor.” Many Japanese took it for granted that they had to sacrifice their lives.

The demolition of State Shinto by the Shinto Directive at the end of the war was followed by Emperor Hirohito’s Imperial Rescript at the beginning of 1946 which—under the direction of General Headquarters—renounced the emperor’s divinity, calling it a “false conception.” Mishima thought Hirohito was “wrong in treating his divinity as fiction.”

For Mishima, the Emperor was god, and therefore did not have to say or do anything. During the war, the “emperor’s presence as God in itself was an order to die.” Mishima, it would appear, could not bear the “death of God.” He blamed Hirohito for “failing to satisfy those who died for the emperor as God.” Mishima killed himself on November 25, 1970, crying out “long live the emperor.” He disclosed, Kimura says, an emotion that had been “hidden in the depths of the psyche for many Japanese since the war ended.”

Mishima expected his death to be “proof that the emperor was actually present as God.” By virtue of his spectacular death by seppuku, Mishima sought to “revive the belief in the emperor as God” in an age when people had “begun to forget the belief they had during WWII.” Of course, for those who did not share his belief, Mishima “died in vain for a God who was no longer there.”