Police protection for The Jewess in Dresden
NewsFirst reports from Dresden’s world premiere of Detlev Glanert’s new opera focus on the intensive security around it.
The police presence in Dresden is obvious this weekend. On the anniversary of the bombing of the city on February 13th, neo-Nazis regularly announce their marches. The political atmosphere is already tense, just before the state elections and with the AfD’s current poll numbers in Saxony. It’s rare that the Semperoper’s schedule is so seemingly contemporary With the “Jewess of Toledo” by Detlev Glanert, whose opera “Oceane” was a great success at its premiere in Berlin , and its lyricist Hans-Ulrich Treichel, a new opera can be seen that is about anti-Semitism and hatred , intolerance, fanaticism.
The opera is based on a 19th centuury novel by the Austrian national poet Frfanz Grillparzer.
More here.
photo: Semperoper Dresden/Ludwig Olah
Really, you should check your sources. I was at the premiere, and not a policeman or a Nazi was to be seen anywhere. Police was there the following day to ensure that right wing demos which had nothing to do with the Jewess would not escalate.
Was it as tedious as Oceane?
The actual name of the work is “Die Jüdin von Toledo” (“The Jewess of Toledo,” though in English the term Jewish can strike people as problematic.) The staging in Dresden shows the Moorish skyline of Toledo. Given the strong anti-Islamic movement in Germany, mostly through the AfD (see my post about that,) the opera takes on meanings that have a special relevance. In Moorish Spain all three Abrahamic religions lived in a relatively peaceful coexistence. There was even something of a Jewish renaissance whose influences exist to this day, but not long after the Reconquista, the Jews of Spain were expelled in their entirety.
At the end of the linked article, the author quotes Sartre’s famous line, “Hell is other people.” The issues at hand illustrate the point, the rise of anti-Israel and anti-Islamic behavior, the anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden, the Ukraine and Gazan wars. I think not only of October 7th, but also of the over 28,000 people killed so far in Gaza and with more to come. This already includes an estimated 15 to 16 thousand children with more rotting under the rubble, a half million people suffering starvation, two million displaced and living in terrible conditions, 85% of the habitats in the strip Gaza destroyed, and the not unfounded fears of ethnic cleasing.
In this context, it should also be noted that the worst manifestations of anti-Semitism in Germany are directed toward the country’s large Moslem population. (Arabs, of course, are also Semites.) In Germany and elsewhere, this anti-Moslem furor could easily metastasize to viral anti-Jewish forms of anti-Semitism. Below are five examples of anti-Moslem campaign posters that paper the entire country in Germany. The examples are countless.
https://www.welt.de/kultur/article154576096/Eine-kleine-Kulturgeschichte-der-Diskriminierung.html
https://www.alamy.de/stockfoto-anti-islam-plakat-in-deutschland-31942907.html
https://retopea.eu/s/en/item/5941
https://www.pro-remscheid.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/wahlplakat_pro_remscheid_moschee_2020.jpg
https://www.alamy.de/stockfoto-anti-islam-plakat-in-deutschland-31938828.html
The syntagma “ antisemite” has never been used about muslim population but only against Jews.
Nevertheless Muslims who discriminate Jews are pure and simple antisemites.
When you “think not only of October 7th”, you should realize of course that all of the death and destruction in Gaza after that date is the inevitable direct result of October 7th and therefore should be blamed fully on perpetrators of that monstrous massacre+kidnapping event, together with its organizers/supporters/enablers.
Indeed the rightwing surge in Germany is a total embarrassment. Fortunately over the last weeks, hundreds of thousands of normal Germans went into the streets to protest against the rightwing extremist sewage. They are the ‘silent majority’.
Mentioning the Israel-Gaza war has nothing to do with German antisemitism that was already bubbling-up long before these gruesome happenings in the Middle-East.
And then, besides the point: the anti-israel demonstrations – in Germany but also in the UK – are even more embarrassing than the rightwing movements themselves: a 70% of a population choose to be led by terrorists of the most evil kind, and they are still entirely behind them, so of course all the terror and misery that automatically result from that choice is their own responsibility.
When hundreds of thousands of people go out to counter-protest, they cease being the “silent majority.” The term long referred to the dead, until American politicians began to use it for the part of the population who did NOT engage in public discourse.
Most famously, Richard Nixon, who claimed this constituency, publicly silent on the Vietnam war when millions demonstrated and campaigned against it. As a result, the term tends to be slightly derogatory, synonymous with the “no opinions” on poll questions.
Yes the expression used is in the sense of a metaphor – the very loud silent majority.
With all respect John, the ‘silent majority’ are those who support the Jews and condemn the Nazi-like behaviour of the useful idiots of the extreme left who are committed, Hitler-like, to their elimination.
It’s true that about two million people have protested the AfD’s discussions of deporting even German citizens who have an immigrant background. The problem is that those two million protesters represent 1.67% of the population while the AfD is polling at 20% of the voters nationwide. It remains to be seen how these numbers will affect the future governments of Germany.
And this is to say nothing of Geert Wilders in your country, the Netherlands whose policies align closely with the AfD.
If those figures are true, all the worse for Germany. But it is suggested (in the many analyses in the more thoughtful media) that many of those AfD votes are ‘protest votes’, as has been established in the Netherlands where one third of the population voted for extreme rightwing idiot Wilders. The level of stupidity is abyssmal. I think all of this decline: people voting against their own interests, being driven by ignorance and hatred, is the result of globalized capitalist modernity which leaves many people in an alienated haze of incomprehension.
‘German citizens of immigrant background’ sounds like the recent ‘converts to Christianity’ with which the UK is currently having to deal. Anything to avoid deportation, in other words.
Open your eyes and your mind.
Anybody who has followed a bit all the indepth media attention given to the millions of Syrian fugitives who could make it to Germany in 2015 and beyond, knows that the majority of immigrants from anywhere outside Europe simply become European.
It is ignorance and identity politics which give the wrong perspective. The problems and abberations are as worrying for the new Europeans as they are for anybody else, because they threaten their existence much more than the ‘locals’.
@ John: Nothing beside the point in that at all. Western leftists, in their infinite stupidity, now accuse the most oppressed people in the history of the world of being oppressors. It belongs to the list of grievances to which these intellectually-disadvantaged ideologists mindlessly sign up. It would be laughable if it were not so dangerous.
Perhaps it’s all a salutary lesson about consulting your own people in a democracy over radical demographic and social change. Imposing that kind of change from on high was always going to yield consequences.
Two errors in my above posts. One should read, “…though in English the term *Jewess* can be seen as problematic…..” And the second, the stage set of the opera includes a scene of the Grand Mosque of Cordoba, not the Moorish skyline. Also, in the first link I list, one needs to scroll down to see the example of an anti-Islamic campaign poster.
Just two errors? The whole comment is bilge.
The reconstruction fo Dresden’s inner city is an admirable and courageous creation of restoration of cultural identity. It was an inititative of the burghers themselves, supported by a couple of investors and fundraising programs in the USA. Leftwing politicians were against it – so that it became to be seen as a rightwing project, what it never was. All the more embarrassing that Saxony has developed into an AfD territory.
And you honestly think AfD is the problem? Grief…
The AfD wants to deport even German citizens who have immigrant backgrounds. According to polls, the party is now the second largest in Germany. To deny this is a problem speaks volumes about the comments section of SD.
I agree.
And it took me a couple of weeks to let sink-in the meaning of the AfD vote numbers.
But again: many of them are simply protest votes, which would wither away in different circumstances. It is no coincidence that the former DDR area has become AfD territory. When politics get more and more distant from the reality ‘on the ground’ for many people, you get a reaction. Add to that a decreasing educational level, and you get a primitive longing for authoritarianism.
Hannah Arendt has already written in the late fourties that alienation and loneliness in the modern world are the important sources of longing for a simple, authoritarian leader with simple, authoritatian answers, whom people merely have to follow and then, everything will be allright.