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István Szabó's Taking Sides (2001) and the Denazification of Wilhelm Furtwängler

2010; Routledge; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439680903577300

1465-3451

John Gardiner,

European history and politics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Notes 1 Wilhelm Furtwängler, Notebooks. 1924–54, ed. Michael Tanner (London, 1995), 161. 2 Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master: the controversial life and career of Wilhelm Furtwängler (New York and Oxford, 1992), 322. 3 For a general history, see Perry Biddiscombe, The Denazification of Germany: a history, 1945–48 (Stroud, 2007). On Denazification in music, see Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Aldershot, 2007), 39–74. 4 For the details of the Furtwängler case, mindful that Shirakawa is evidently a Furtwängler supporter, see Shirakawa, Devil's Music Master, 294–337. 5 Arnold is an invented character, but most of his questions and accusations are based on those made at the tribunal in December 1946. This makes the film factually informed if historically out-of-sequence, although this is of no particular consequence given the issues at stake. 6 On Furtwängler's relationship with the Nazis, see Richard J. Evans, Playing for the devil: Furtwängler and the Nazis, in: Rereading German History: from unification to reunification, 1800–1996 (London, 1997), 187–193; Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: musicians and their music in the Third Reich (New York, 1997), 195–203. 7 While acknowledging that Furtwängler could hardly have challenged the Nazis' racial policies in any outright way if he had remained in Germany, to complain about the purely artistic impact of anti-Semitic policies hardly, if at all, counts in Furtwängler's moral favour. Taking Sides seems sound on Furtwängler's racial views: no principled hater of Jews, he did produce casually anti-Semitic comments. 8 Shirakawa, Devil's Music Master, 289. 9 Indeed Harwood has Furtwängler allude to Shostakovich's position in the play of Taking Sides, 27. Shostakovich's most vulnerable political period ran from the Lady Macbeth crisis of 1936, when Pravda attacked his opera as being out of step with Socialist Realism, to the artistic crackdown by Zhdanov in 1948. Although Shostakovich had 'corrected' his music after the Fifth Symphony (1937), there had been 'aberrations' such as the Eighth (1943) and Ninth (1945) Symphonies. These dates, 1936–1948, correspond quite closely to those of Furtwängler's activity under Nazi-dominated Germany and his return, Denazified, to conducting. 10 On this now tired but seemingly inexhaustible debate see Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich versus Volkov: whose Testimony?, and Volkov's Testimony reconsidered, in: Malcolm Hamrick Brown (ed.), A Shostakovich Casebook (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2004), 11–66. 11 Taking Sides, 27. 12 Ibid., 34. 13 At the end of the play, Wills refers to Furtwängler as a 'fallen priest,' which is probably nearer the mark. Taking Sides, 59. 14 Taking Sides, 13. 15 See also the Furtwängler sequence in The Art of Conducting: great conductors of the past (Sue Knussen, Warner Music; UK, 2002). 16 Another Pinter echo in Taking Sides is the fact that it is a very male-dominated film; Straube is the only main female part. 17 Furtwängler put the finishing touches to his Second Symphony during his Denazification experience. Listening to that work, in a sympathetic modern recording such as that by Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Teldec 0927 43495 2), one is struck by its sincerity, its rootedness in Germanic music of the past (especially Bruckner), the excellence of some of its ideas, and the extent to which these ideas are worked beyond their strength. It is a noble work, but it is flawed. It stands almost as a symbol of Furtwängler in Taking Sides. 18 Perhaps this should not surprise us, as Szabó's 1981 film Mephisto portrays a character called Hendrik Höfgen, based on the actor Gustaf Gründgens, who seems to sell his soul to forge a successful career in Nazi Germany. Gründgens himself, by a fitting twist, became celebrated for playing Mephistopheles, agent of the Devil. A further twist, given what will follow, is that Klaus Mann (son of Thomas) wrote the novel from which Szabó adapted his film. 19 Evans, Playing, 192. 20 Furtwängler, Notebooks, 157; Shirakawa, Devil's Music Master, 342. 21 Furtwängler, Notebooks, 151. 22 Ibid., 117. 23 Furtwängler was indeed keen on the idea of a great and resurgent Germany. This is close to one aspect of Nazi thinking, and a possibility not explored by Taking Sides is that Furtwängler shared this belief with the Nazis about the destiny of Germany. This might help to explain why he stayed. 24 Rob Cowan's notes for Deutsche Grammophon's 2002 Wilhelm Furtwängler: Live Recordings, 1944–1953 (DG 474 030-2); Karl Dietrich Gräwe's notes for Deutsche Grammophon's 2001 Wilhelm Furtwängler: recordings, 1942–1944, vol. 2 (DG 471 294-2); Sami-Alexander Habra's detailed essay on Furtwängler's conducting of Beethoven's 9th Symphony on the Société Wilhelm Furtwängler website (www.furtwangler.net/beethoven/lvb9-1en.html; accessed 25 July 2009). 25 Note to Archipel's 2004 issue of the recording (ARPCD 0270). 26 Once again Taking Sides cannot avoid a descent into sentiment at this point. A tiny sequence within this piece of archive film is repeated and emphasised by close-up: the moment when, after shaking Goebbels' hand, Furtwängler discreetly wipes his hand with a handkerchief. The suggestion is clearly that Furtwängler is repelled by physical contact with Goebbels. A different view is that Furtwängler was wiping his palms after conducting a piece that is physically hard work. 27 On his jealousy of the young Karajan, for instance, see Richard Osborne, Herbert von Karajan: a life in music (London, 1998), 116–117, 120, 142–145. 28 Shirakawa, Devil's Music Master, 81. 29 There was opposition from some American critics (musical and social: by 1936, Hitler's anti-Semitism and disregard for the Treaty of Versailles had become clear), and Furtwängler must have sensed that even if he had wanted to take the position, the Nazis would have made it awkward for him. 30 See David Monod, Settling Scores: German music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill and London, 2005). 31 The young are not the only people to be dispossessed of their pre-war lives in Taking Sides, as the scenes of middle-aged and elderly people bartering goods on the streets of Berlin suggest. Many of these people, considering the items they are buying and selling, were almost certainly not street vendors before the war. It may be significant that Straube's recording of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony is bought this way—cultural heritage rescued, literally, from the rubble of war. 32 So much of a cultural asset was Furtwängler to the Soviets that the tapes of Furtwängler's concerts made by German radio were sent back to the USSR after the liberation of Berlin and jealously guarded until the days of Glasnost. The majority of the Furtwängler recordings on Deutsche Grammophon were released only in the late 1980s using the returned tapes as a source.