New Government commits to Munich concert hall

The political world of Munich is so complex it is difficult to understand. The archly conservative Christian Socialist Union has ruled Bavaria for all but three years since the war. One of its slogans is “so far right as the law allows,”–a troubling concept in the birth city of the Third Reich and the city Hitler called his spiritual home.

And yet the CSU has a stronger commitment to funding education and culture than any other party in Germany. It is, however, education and culture occasionally tinted with troubling ideas. I remember in the 1980s when a high level CSU politician demanded the firing of a university scholar who was publishing work about Wagner’s anti-Semitism. There were similar examples of censorship in some of Munich’s state theaters. As in Austria, tinges of ethno-nationalism permeated the cultural world that sometimes even hinted at old outdated ideas…to speak discretely.

It was interesting to see these outdated mentalities represented among intellectuals and their institutions. The Ehrenschrift for Siegfried Mauser, a former Dean of Munich’s University of Music who was convicted of sexually assaulting two colleagues, is a notable example.

Another is Ernst Nolte, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, who claimed in various writings that immigrants are destroying Western Culture. He also made assertions viewed as Holocaust revisionism. See:

http://www.osborne-conant.org/nolt_comment.htm

Another Berlin Professor, Norbert Bolz, has written extensively that women should not be allowed to have jobs since it is leading to the dissolution of German families.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Bolz

Conservatives were not exactly alone with these ideas. The Berlin SPD politician, Thilo Sarrazin, published a book in 2010 asserting that immigrants were lowering the general IQ of Germany and diluting its culture. He even claimed that all Jews share a certain gene. His book became a bestseller in Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thilo_Sarrazin

So on one hand, one celebrates Munich’s massive and incomparable support for classical music, but at the same time one senses some of the darker ethno-nationalistic tendencies that lurk behind it. (The Vienna Philharmonic in Austria is perhaps the most transparent example of these problems–or was before recent reforms.) Fortunately, there are many people in Germany who oppose these old fashioned views, but sadly, their voices seem a bit weaker in the stodgy classical music community.

In any case, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra is the second best orchestra in Germany and deserves a good, modern concert hall. I hope its eventual construction won’t reinforce unfortunate worldviews.