Munich, Germany, where I believe that I may have, umm, encountered Herbert von Karajan in the summer of 1974 1932.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
At Christmas 2020, my wife gave me a book of which I had never heard:\u00a0 David Pryce-Jones, Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime<\/em> (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2020).\u00a0 The author, David Pryce-Jones, is a British conservative intellectual who was born in Vienna to a future editor of the Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, grew up multilingual, was educated at Eton and Oxford, and is either related to or somehow knows seemingly everybody \u2014 especially English and continental European writers and artists.\u00a0 His family relations include Helena Bonham Carter and others in England but also prominent, often aristocratic, figures in Germany and France and Spain.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Signatures<\/em> is a book of vignettes.\u00a0 The title comes from the signed copies of their books that the subjects of those vignettes \u2014 folks like Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin\u2019s daughter), Kingsley Amis, W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin, Robert Conquest, Milovan Djilas, Lawrence Durrell, Amos Elon, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, W. Somerset Maugham, V. S. Naipaul, J. B. Priestly, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Revel, Erich Segal, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Albert Speer, Dame Rebecca West, and, well, you get the idea \u2014 gave him at various times.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I enjoyed the book, having read it as it\u2019s structured \u2014 in short bits.\u00a0 Here are a few passages that caught the attention of my ever present pencil as I read it:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The most quoted of [Robert Conquest\u2019s] limericks is a masterpiece of Sovietology:<\/span><\/p>\nThere was an old Marxist called Lenin<\/span><\/p>\nWho did two or three million men in.<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s a lot to have done in,<\/span><\/p>\nBut where he did one in,<\/span><\/p>\nThat grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.\u00a0 (85)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The opening line of Pryce-Jones\u2019s short essay devoted to Arno Breker, who was often described as \u201cHitler\u2019s favorite sculptor\u201d and who had signed Pryce-Jones\u2019s copy of Bildnisse unserer Epoche<\/em>, reads thus: \u201cThe life and times of Arno Breker is a warning that bad art has the power to do great damage\u201d (52).\u00a0 The two passages that I marked in that essay both briefly recounted disappointing anecdotes from the lives of very prominent people under the Nazi occupation of Paris \u2014 in these cases, specifically, relating to one of the greatest of twentieth-century conductors and to a famous French existentialist philosopher whose biography has often celebrated (and perhaps, some have argued, exaggerated) his involvement in the French Resistance to the Nazis.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The first of them involves a composition by Richard Wagner; the Paris Opera; the great Berlin Philharmonic conductor at the time, Wilhelm Furtw\u00e4ngler; Maestro Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s eventual successor, Herbert von Karajan; and the question of how the French and even the Germans should handle the Nazi occupation of France.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Invited to conduct a star-studded Tristan and Isolde<\/em> at the Opera, Furtw\u00e4ngler refused on the grounds that he would not conduct \u201con the back of German tanks.\u201d\u00a0 Herbert von Karajan, an honorary Colonel in the SS, felt no such scruple, and immediately took Furtw\u00e4ngler\u2019s place.\u00a0 (53)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gerhard Heller, the censor and therefore responsible ultimately to Josef Goebbels and the Propaganda Staffel, described the numerous writers beseeching him to put on their manuscripts his stamp of approval, complete with swastika, without which they could not be published.\u00a0 Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most persistent, spending hours in Heller\u2019s office.\u00a0 (55)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
By the way, I believe that I once ran into Herbert von Karajan.\u00a0 Literally.\u00a0 Immediately after the conclusion of my mission in Switzerland, I traveled with my parents a bit around my old missionary areas in Switzerland itself and to Bavaria and Austria.\u00a0 One day, for some reason, I was in a classical record store in Munich.\u00a0 Coming around the end of an aisle, I collided (not very badly but, still, directly) with a distinguished-looking older gentleman who seemed vaguely familiar to me.\u00a0 We apologized mutually.\u00a0 And then I noticed nearby a nearly life-sized, full color cardboard cut-out of Herbert von Karajan, who had, by that time, long since succeeded Furtw\u00e4ngler as the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.\u00a0 I could still see the man with whom I had collided and my thought, comparing the man with the cardboard cut-out, was that , if he wasn\u2019t von Karajan himself, he was von Karajan\u2019s twin.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I agree with Pryce-Jone\u2019s formulation of what he terms<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
the credo of the genuine conservative, namely that the veneer of civilization is frighteningly thin, hard to create but easy to destroy.\u00a0 (86)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
His \u201ccredo\u201d is certainly illustrated by the rise of Nazism in the heart of the land of Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart.\u00a0 That\u2019s why events such as the 6 January 2021 assault on the Capitol of the United States so offend me, and it\u2019s why I consider loyalty to the Constitution of the United States so fundamentally important in my evaluation of American political candidates.\u00a0 (I still do such evaluation privately, even though \u2014 speaking publicly \u2014 I no longer have any political views at all.)\u00a0 And I can say that, in my judgment, remarkably few of the candidates that I evaluate earn better than a C.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 I\u2019m pleased to announce that the first portion of the Interpreter Foundation\u2019s forthcoming two-part docudrama, Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, has been selected for screening at the 21st annual LDS Film Festival, which is scheduled for early March. \u00a0 This year\u2019s festival will be held at the SCERA Center […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[27485,259,27476,5691,4642,27498,27503,2253,27479,27488,21617,18046,23273,18323,3676,13810,3685,27491,4644,27494,27501,2292,5688,21646,27495,27482,921,6384,21713],"class_list":["post-93870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-berlin-philharmonic","tag-book-of-mormon-witnesses","tag-david-pryce-jones","tag-eight-witnesses","tag-france","tag-furtwangler","tag-genesis-5","tag-german","tag-herbert-von-karajan","tag-jean-paul-sartre","tag-lds-film-festival","tag-lenin","tag-moses-6","tag-munich","tag-nazi","tag-nazis","tag-nazism","tag-occupation","tag-paris","tag-robert-conquest","tag-sartre","tag-stalin","tag-three-witnesses","tag-undaunted-witnesses-of-the-book-of-mormon","tag-von-karajan","tag-wilhelm-furtwangler","tag-witnesses","tag-witnesses-film","tag-witnesses-of-the-book-of-mormon"],"yoast_head":"\n
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