All-night rave for Goebbels birthday
OrchestrasGermany’s SWR2 channel is turning over its entire output tonight to the works of the innovative composer Heiner Goebbels, who turns 70 tomorrow.
(Could you imagine any part of the BBC doing that?)
Goebbels, who divides his time between Frankfurt and Berlin, plays Bach at the piano for relaxation.
Frankly, I find the headline in bad taste. One cannot but think of Josef Goebbels, be shocked, and click to read more. How about changing it to “Heiner Goebbels”?
In that case why not just refer to him as plain Dr Goebbels, that way nobody will be offended.
Amen!
AND what’s more, there’s an apostrophe missing…. !
I think it was probably deliberate. There appears to be a weird Third Reich fixation within the British media in general and this site in particular. Which is a shame, because it’s a useful source of information in other respects.
Goebbels was a tuerkey.
Just to be clear, this is a transmission which doesn’t start until after midnight, running from 00:03 to 06:00. Before that SWR2 will, in common with 8 other German stations, be broadcasting this evening’s ARD Radiofestival programming (including the Salzburg Adbdrazakov / Muti concert).
No, I can’t imagine the BBC pushing the boat out for a Heiner Goebbels all-nighter but, within living memory, Radio 3 did give over 8 night-time hours to Max Richter’s ‘Sleep’.
An “all-night rave”: from just after midnight to 6 a.m? And it wouldn’t surprise me if Radio 3 did the same sort of thing from time to time. (I remember with mixed feelings a week of solid J.S. Bach some years ago.)
Yes, Germany promotes culture in this way. One of the major reasons is that it focuses on soft power such as cultural offerings exactly because it has become a strongly demilitarized society. The desire for power and domination are still there, but they must be realized through other means. It’s interesting to see how effective this approach to soft power is, especially when amplified by a massive system of cultural industry.
One problem is that this sort of Staatskultur can only act within the confines the establishment approves. We thus see a notable lack of genuinely challenging politicization and a preponderance of preciously arty visual, textual, and musical abstractions devoid of social meanings. As one of the performers says at around 6:25 in the above video, “one of the biggest challenges is to stop trying to understand” and just go along, to just feel the moment. Certainly an important aesthetic in our hollowed out culture.