Vienna Philharmonic offers ‘very late apology’ to its Nazi victims
NewsThe orchestra chairman Daniel Froschauer has outlined plans to commemorate 16 members of the orchestra who were thrown out after Austria’s 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany. Most escaped into impoverished exile. Six were murdered in concentration camps.
It is estamted that around 100 employees of the Vienna State Opera were similarly victimised.
Now, the Vienna Philharmonic chairman has offered ‘a very late apology’ to the victims, who continued to suffer from the orchestra’s post-War refusal to recognise their suffering. Over the next year, he tells Rebecca Schmid in the New York Times, the orchestra will organise Stolpersteine outside the houses of those who were expelled, along with two commemorative concerts.
“One should simply never forget,” said Froschauer. “This is a very late apology and a sign of gratitude for their accomplishments.”
Read on here.
This is a significant moment in a long chronicle of denial. Two past chairmen of the orchestra assured me privately that this would never happen in our lifetimes. It is only in the past decade that the Vienna Philharmonic stripped the city’s Nazi Gauleiter, Baldur von Schirach, of a medal it had given him.
Stolpersteine are progress but not enough. They won’t even be outside the Musikverein but instead scattered about where the musicians’ houses were, so it isn’t really enough of an acknowledgement from the Vienna Phil. There needs to be some kind of memorial at the Musikverein.
If I remember rightly Bayreuth, for example, has a commemorative garden directly outside the Festspielhaus for Jewish musicians who played in the orchestra and were expelled, with signs showing their photos and describing their life stories as far as known.
How can we ever forget? Too many outright (former) Nazis held influential positions in postwar Austria and Germany too. It’s only now when they have virtually all died that the Vienna Phil can revisit their painful past and acknowledge at long last their past involvement in the Nazis horrors and the Holocaust.
My great-aunt Rosa z”l always said that in her experience pre WW2 the Viennese were more anti-Semitic than the Munchners.
Too little, too late …
Good. Now if only the rest of Austria would join them in this long overdue apology. That country has always been in extreme denial re: its Nazi past, fervent support for their native son Hitler etc. – so unlike the approach of post-war Germany.
Wasn’t there a long standing “joke” that after WWII the Viennese would like you to believe that Beethoven was Austrian and hitler a German. A well-known conductor who grew up in Vienna expressed the opinion that by and large Viennese gemutlichkeit was a facade.
This has indeed been a long and slow process. Much of the initiative arose in 1995 (27 years ago) when protests began against the orchestra’s exclusion of women and those who are not Caucasian. As the discussions and protests grew, correlations were naturally made with the orchestra’s Nazi past and its lax denazification after the war. Here is an article written in 2000 about the protests:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/Taking-on.htm
And here is an article in Leonardo Music Journal in 1999 (published by the M.I.T. Press) that discusses the orchestra’s postwar exclusion of women and racial minorities and notes the correlations with earlier ideologies. There’s a link at the beginning to a German translation:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/prophets.htm
I faced years of ostracism for my efforts with these matters. Daniel Froschauer is to be strongly commended for his work. The ultimate resolution of these issues only comes when Austrians lead the initiatives. With the increasing representation of women in the orchestra, and with the open discussion of the orchestra’s past, we see that sincere change has been made.
The phrase “emotional unity” , quoted in the article, seems to be a circumlocution for male homoerotism. Is the VP homoerotic?
Has any conductor ever protested against this situation? I imagine no, or the VP would have never invited them back. Like Muti on the picture of your first article; has gone back there for 50 years … so I imagine he has protested very little.
No conductor has ever refused to work with the VPO due to its gender and racial ideologies–or at least not publicly. At least one of the men in the 1996 WDR interview is homosexual, but I don’t know if homosexuality informed the orchestra’s concepts of all-male emotional unity. In general, the attitudes seemed to be based on misogyny and concepts of male superiority.
Regarding Muti, in 1997 my wife won the audition for the Maggio Musicale (the orchestra of Florence.) Muti was the GMD but was conducting in Philadelphia at the time. The orchestra manager telephoned him and told him they had found a trombonist. Muti said there were already too many women in the orchestra and vetoed Abbie’s appointment so they took the man who came in second.
Not as brutal als the Taliban in Afghanistan, but just as discriminatory!
Even people as horrific as the Taliban pale in comparison to the Holocaust and its brutality.
Correlated to this story, I recommend the film Woman In Gold about the octogenarian Maria Altman who sued the Austrian government for the return of her family’s Gustav Klimt painting by the same name which had been stolen by the Nazis. Her lawyer was Randy Schoenberg, the grandson of Arnold. The film is very well-made and gives a good sense of what it can sometimes be like dealing with these historical issues in Austria and Germany. The film was available on Netflix, but it might already be gone in some regions.
Good gesture!
If anyone is interested in reading more about the VPO in the Nazi period, there is a lot of material (written by historians) on their website, including about each of the persecuted musicians:
https://www.wienerphilharmoniker.at/en/orchestra/history/nationalsozialismus#vienna-philharmonic-musicians-in-exile-10626
Burghauser, who is mentioned in the NYT article, seems to be an interesting case. He was forced to relinquish the position of chairman due to his close ties to the Austrian dictatorship and his marriage to a Jewish woman. He tried to divorce his wife (who had already fled) and keep his job (cynically or out of desperation, who knows). Burghauser ultimately decided to flee to the U.S., aided by Toscanini’s wife.
I think it is still the case that the most objective and complete reports need to be independent of the VPO. Their website’s essential purpose is public relations.
I don’t know, they commissioned reputable historians to write these pieces. Including Trümpi, who has been very critical of the VPO, much like yourself.
I find Trumpi’s reports too circumspect, mostly by creating excessively narrow examinations that leave out important correlations needed to truly understand the orchestra and its history. In his study of the Nazi use of the Berlin and Vienna Phils, for example, he says very little about the lax postwar denazification of the VPO which I think is important for understanding the larger picture of the orchestra’s relationships to the Nazis. Historians should be autonomous which is less the case when they are handpicked by the institution they are studying and when their work is put on their website devoted to public relations. Another problem is that the VPO carefully restricts access to its archives. This can leaves historians with the feeling they are on thin ice and limited in what they can say, especially in the atmosphere surrounding the VPO in Vienna which can be intimidating.
Oh, are we supposed to applaud them now?
What a pile of garbage!!
It is certainly too late, but Mr. Froschauer was not the chairman 30 or 40 years ago. Would you rather have him continue the denial and lack of any acknowledgment? Perhaps applause would be too much, but at least one could and should recognize that finally there is a sincere effort.
No, his father was.
How could one man cause so much trouble ? Look at him today in photos. A buffoon.
Hopefully the Vienna Phil. will begin performing more of the “entartete” (forbidden) works by the Jewish composers who’s careers and lives were wrecked by the nazi regime – people like Franz Schrecker, Schulhoff, Korngold, Braunfels, Goldschmidt, Hans Eisler, etc., etc. Also, it’s about time Decca makes a box set available of their entire Entartete series of recordings. This would be the perfect time to do it.
I would like to see the Israel Philharmonic perform all this music, too.
this action leads one to wonder why now?
May I speculate that because the surviving older players who preferred to cover things up no longer have a stranglehold on the orchestra’s actions?
That is correct. Public and political pressure also played a large role in the orchestra’s gradual changes.
The VPO often precedes its New Years Concert with public relations initiatives.
Vienna invented modern antisemitism and wasn’t Hitler from Austria … so I guess I am not in the least surprised they would not apologize to the Jews!
If it wasn’t for us, the British, the whole continent would be a giant swastika with Vienna and Berlin at the center!
“modern antisemitisim” was hardly unique to Austria. It existed all throughout Europe. Britain had many nazi sympathisers prior to the actual fighting (and perhaps even during some of the earlier stages of the fighting). Here’s something to chew on.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-british-high-society-fell-in-love-with-the-nazis
Rubbish! Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna, invented modern antisemitism as a political doctrine and consensus creating political machine. He was the model for Hitler and all the garbage you are referring to.
Vienna was the cradle of mass hatred against the Jews at a level and scale which was unseen before and unique to Austria and Central Europe and directly led to the disaster that only we, the British, stood up against! Thanks to a man named Churchill who made very clear where the British people were standing…. And it wasn’t on the side of Hitler and his Italian garbage man Mussolini!
Don’t mix the British with the Jew hating Austrians and Germans!
Now the attack on garbage men would appear to be unjustified. They perform a function vital in every civilized society. I recently visited Rome and Naples and can say: it is tough out there without the garbage men. You may run into a boar trying to eat your foot on the street as a delicacy!
King Edward 1 in 1290…
Karl Lueger became mayor of Vienna in 1897. Have you ever heard of Alfred Dreyfus? Sentenced for treason in 1894, and not in Austria. Or perhaps you have heard of Richard Wagner and a certain article he wrote in 1850. How about the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, published in 1903 in Russia?
As for the UK, I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_United_Kingdom
Lueger was a vicious antisemite, no doubt. But he did not invent antismitism, nor was it constrained to Austria or Germany.
Actually, 80% of the Wehrmacht was on the Eastern front. Causalities for the UK was 383,700. For the USSR it was 27 million.
sure, Go Stalin!
The Man of Steel was Churchill’s friend and among the founders of the state of Israel. Ah, the twist and turns of history!
One also thinks of the boulevard Stalingrad in Paris. I’m no fan of Stalin who was a monster, which should go without saying, but it is a historical fact that the USSR played the largest role by far in defeating the Nazis–something important France, a country that was defeated and occupied by the Nazis.
This is long long overdue, but that it took so long was all part of Austrian society’s longstanding inability to face the reality of their nation’s dark and ugly history and face up to the past horrors that they committed as a country. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Austrians proved themselves, on repeated occasions, to be masters of cognitive dissonance. We all remember ex Nazi Wehrmacht Intelligence Officer Kurt Waldheim having been kept in power by the nation as President of Austria between 1986 until 1992, in spite of revelations about is Nazi past and war crimes that he committed. Waldheim was just the tip of the iceberg in Austria.
It is very good to see that Austria has matured as a nation and the current generation of leaders want to erase the terrible image that the country has had for too long. The fact that the Vienna Philharmonic has taken this initiative is a very positive sign, as the VPO symbolises the more traditional and conservative side of Austrian society, one that in the past was not sympathetic to apologies nor accepting or acknowledging the inhuman criminal acts of their nation and its leaders.
Congratulations to the VPO management for doing this. It is never too late to right a wrong.
At the risk of being – unfairly- criticized for not sticking to the assigned topic, I must note that Muti is one of the favorite conductors of this orchestra. And so was Gergiev ( remember the infamous Carnegie Hall aborted VP concerts)?
This orchestra seems to truly lack good judgement, in both its choice of conductors and its botched ridiculous attempts to cure (past?) antisemitism.
Still, they do play so much better than the Chicago Symphony (a low bar, I know).
Very, very late. The story should name the victims; I doubt that the number 16 is correct.
Well, it is common knowledge that the Austrians were (excuse the word) “better” nazis than the germans. Which other country in Europe handed over their authority to the nazis without a fight. This alone speaks volumes
Victor Hochauser organised a European tour of the Warsaw Jewish theatre in 1963. My Mother, a holocaust survivor, was an actress in that company.
In Vienna they arrived at the theatre to find dog excrement smeared on all the publicity posters.
There was no process of facing up to legacy in Austria. Apologies? Are you joking?
Fast forward to 2022:
Universal editions and the estates of many Austrian composers tainted with Nazi association (Pfizner, Joseph Marx, Franz Schmidt and many others) cheerfully promote these neglected masters by washing out their biographies of unfortunate association. many in the industry pin their flag to this. Sure, play the music: But don’t lie about the backstory.
A mere act of omission…
or revisionism?