12-06-2022, 12:24 AM
Few peoples are as inseparable from music as the German people, and that included (until Hitler chose to discard them in the worst way, for the worst reasons, and to no gain for the German people) those Germans of Jewish faith. I look at the Holocaust, and I see the Nazis killing off the people arguably the least dissimilar to themselves.
This story involves the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the cultural madhouse that was Nazi Germany. The "cellist" refers to Elisabeth Lasker-Wallfisch (a Holocaust survivor) and to her grandson Rafael Wallfisch, also a cellist.
I am not quite sure where to place this documentary, but I strongly urge everyone to witness it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.