Aachen dumps Karajan bust over Nazi past
NewsThe intendant of the Aachen Theatre, Elena Tzavara, has removed the bust of Herbert von Karajan from its foyer after hearing a lecture on his activities during the Third Reich.
Karajan joined the NSDAP in 1933 and was appointed music director in Aachen the following year, holding the post until 1941. His advancement under the Nazis was stalled by the hostility of Wilhelm Furtwängler, whom Hitler preferred, but Karajan went on to conduct the Staatskapelle Berlin as a poster boy for the regime. He performed the bloodstained Horst Wessel Lied many times and gave concerts in occupied Paris. Karajan never uttered a public word of regret for his Nazi past, which Aachen has just discovered.
‘Herbert von Karajan in the Nazi period was not a blank page,’ said Tzavara, who has despatched his bust to the town museum.
Operagoers will now be greeted by a bust of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Karajan went on, after the War, to head the Sazlburg Festival and succeed Furtwängler at the Berlin Philharmonic.
Tzavara, 46, is an award-winning director of children’s operas.
Cancel culture….there are pros and cons involving it.
Did she only just learn of this phase of HvK’s life?
She just took over the position in September and is approaching one topic after another.
Of course we all knew it long before September 2023.
But it is better to undertake something and discuss it, than to know and do nothing.
It is not cancelling culture, forbidding Karajan’s legacy (as the Met did to Levine), but the bust goes to the museum. I can understand though, that in the present situation they don’t want the bust to be the first thing you see when enter the opera house.
Yes. And a month ago she hadn’t even heard the name.
Somebody please tell this clueless opportunistic eager-to-please Tzavara idiot that Richard Strauss had been President of the Reichsmusikkammer, and let’s see what her next move will be…
I think I may have posted this before, but I remember visiting Salzburg as a student at the time of the festival and seeing that virtually all the shop windows had pictures of von Karajan in them. That was in the 1970s, just over a quarter of a century after WWII.
I felt very disturbed by the experience.
There’s still a street named after him………….
And in Vienna. But no matter. He existed, he was important and now he’s dead. Try not to let it get you down.
Ridiculous.
If Karajan was a Nazi then so were the almost entire populations of Germany and Austria – and we don’t even know whether he voted for Hitler.
Karajan applied to join the NSDAP in April 1933 in Austria, where it was still illegal. He was that keen.
Much like our current planetary political predicaments, the populations allow horrors to happen…as long as they aren’t on the receiving end of said horrors and disturbed in their homes.
Böhm was “keen”; HvK was merely ambitious (and applied twice).
But Böhm never was a member of the NSDAP.
I met him actually. We talked about Schubert. He was the warmest and most cheerful sort. One would never have imagined that ideology on his mind as a young man.
The Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt.
Surprise : You can be a Fanatic Nazi supporter without being a party member.
That keen or that opportunistic. …or both.
Norman, as much as I respect you, I do not understand why you continue to repeat a falsehood that has been debunked by the scholarly research conducted by your fellow critic/colleague Richard Osborne. Read the published research. The correct story is that Karajan joined the party in 1935 in order to secure the Aachen post. His application was backdated to 1933. This is a black and white issue. No one has successfully refuted Osborne’s scholarship on the subject and showed that there was any error in it.
Just a point…The last 2 elections in Weimar Germany in which Hitler ran were Nov.1932 and March 1933.Where was von Karajan legally living at those times and would he, if still an Austrian, have been eligible to vote?
The Nazi party had 8.5 million memebers. Third Reichs population 80 – 100 million (depends on who is counted). Does not matter who he voted for – he lent his name to the Reich and was well rewarded. Probably was, like many others, a spineless a-moral opportunist.
https://maxraimi.medium.com/tearing-down-statues-984d8a2ee43f
One of the finest, most thoughtful essays I’ve ever read.
it is simple: one should not project contemporary moral convictions upon the past.
So in your view, e are too distant from Nazism or slavery in the US or UK– to condemn it? That is just plain ridiculous.
You can condemn nazis, slavery, mysoginy, etc. of past or present, without projecting contemporary moral convictions upon the past, because you don’t need them.
Thanking you for sharing. Beautiful piece.
Pathetic. Cancel people whose views or tastes you don’t approve of. Cancel all homosexuals and vegans.
Yes Nazism is just a “matter of taste” now is it?
I gather you’re an asexual cannibal?
Twit !
Yes I’m always much worried about the vegans, every time I want to eat a hamburger I get these flashbacks of a protest parade 7 years ago, spoiling my lunch
Sally
“…which Aachen has just discovered.” If this is actually true, then they are simply clueless. It’s a laughable statement. Everyone on this planet, and most certainly in Aachen, has known this for decades.
Major contributors to world culture have shown throughout history to have profound and sometimes monstrous flaws. It is possible to be highly talented, even a genius, and be morally bankrupt. To understand this is not to condone nor to excuse. I wonder if they are also going to remove any remaining busts of Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Heidegger throughout Germany — perhaps also ban any remaining recordings of Karl Böhm.
Eradicating signs of the past does not in any way change that past. The real way to effect change is to courageously acknowledge the past for what it is, and not simply look away from such acknowledgement by hiding any of its signs. This is what the intrinsic childishness of “cancel culture,” in its narcissistic virtue-signalling, radically fails to understand.
The point isn’t to “change the past”. The point is to stop worshipping people as if they were exemplary flawless role models, when in fact they were complicit in the greatest horrors humanity has seen. People who eagerly aided and abetted Nazism don’t belong on pedestals.
Nobody erects busts of the greats, because they were”flawless role models”.
No, it’s always because they were humans with extraordinary achievements in their fields. (and – naturally – all humans also have personal flaws).
It is well known Karajan didn’t “aid” nazism. He was a young and coming conductor, who did anything necessary to have a carreer.
No one’s worshipping anyone, and you’re also about 70 years behind on this concern.
He signed in because of the job in Ulm, he signed in a 2nd time for his job in Aachen. He was so keen that he had forgotten about his first membership. All is documented since decades.
There is far more nuance not allowed here sometimes. We’ve learned few lessons as the current Middle East horrors (both sides) demonstrate yet again.
A more nuanced view of Karajan is reasonably well summarized here:
https://www.classical-music.com/articles/trouble-karajan
None of us are served well by viewing only the polarities.
Ridiculous! Cancel culture at its worst! I wonder how Mrs. Tzavara would have reacted if Hitler himself would asked her for a favour. Would she have denied and rather went to a concentration camp, maybe together with her family?
If the city of Rome would have to remove all the busts of the emperors of ancient Rome – who enslaved people of other countries – or the monuments they built, Rome would become a complete modern city. I doubt if that would be of anyone´s interest. If the Catholic church would have to destroy all the churches they built with the money from selling of indulgences or the gold of the Inkas, there would be churches any more and the Cathilic church would get bankrupt. Well, maybe a better idea than removing the bust of Karajan …
When will this nonsense end? Let us hope that some so called scholar will not discover that Mozart in one of his letters said something that can be interpreted as anti-semityic. Then send His bust to the town museum
As Victor Borge once said, “Mozart was only a bust, whereas his wife went right to the floor. It was an unhappy marriage”!!
Using this logic, they will not ever again be preforming any works by Richard Strauss!
https://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2018/10/strauss-and-nazis.html
Dear Ms. Tzavara,
May I buy that bust from your theater? I have always been a great HvK fan, despite the fact that my parents survived the Holocaust.
It seems to me that if Aachen is going to cancel Karajan, it should also never program any music by Richard Wagner.
A selfish, narcissistic behaviour of a provincial bureaucrate. Karajan´s fame and legacy wil shine forever, while Mrs. Tsavara tries to get a name for herself and gets fame only for a few days and only for removing his bust, one of a thousands Karajan busts, while – sorry, Mrs. Tsvara – no one ever will make a bust for her. That´s life, Mrs. Tsavara. That´s the difference between a unique musical genius and the very small mediocrity of a provincial bureaucrate.
I love how they had to go to a lecture to discover this stuff. That’s the worst part.
The is no right to a bust or a statue.
Putting up a statue is no less a statement of the times than taking one down, the former has no moral priority over the latter.
Just an innocent question and not a rhetorical one: Did Karajan ever express regrets about his political position during this sinister period. -either publicly or privately?
Yes, he talked about it. And he was not allowed to work for two years till 1947, spend one year alone in the mountains in Vorarlberg. When he was in Milano 1944 his wife had to go out for jobs. I have videos from documentaries – cant play anymore. Salzburg Town has a website about him, they must have spyed him after the war, all online.
Having one’s bust made is always tricky concerning one’s staff. I had to pick-up my bust several times from the bin because my PA has issues with seeing the face twice during her work.
The Big spectacles says it all.
Beware one with an Agenda !!!
FWIW, Furtwängler while leading the Berlin Phil was probably more active for the Nazis than HvK.
Mean and petty.
There’s nothing like the vanity of the suddenly awoken. This guy was about 70 years too late.
Is it possible that she only recently found out that Karajan had been a member of the Nazi party? If so, she wasn’t paying attention all these years. And the above comments were posted without attention to Richard Osborne’s biography of Karajan. As far as the Nazi party was concerned Karajan became a member in Aachen in 1935, on the advice of the local music director. But in Salzburg on April 8,1933, he had applied to join (apparently having been approached by a recruiting agent, according to a subsequent party review of his status). He paid an entry sub but his application went nowhere. The huge numbers trying to get on the bandwagon led to a moratorium on membership at that time and the party was banned in Austria in July 1933 after a violent incident. So NL is wrong about him joining when the Nazi party was illegal in Austria. The post-war denazification process found that Karajan had served the party only in a musical capacity, by conducting some concerts. He was not an active member. His only non-musical wartime activity was to serve as an air-raid warden. He was also very lucky in that Hitler took a dislike to him before the war. As a result he was never invited to conduct the annual concert for your man’s birthday (at which Beethoven 9 was performed – cancel Beethoven 9!). There is film of him conducting a concert in Paris in a rather bare hall. No swastikas. No armband. Had he conducted in a swastika-draped hall like Furtwaengler his career might not have recovered. He also divorced his blonde Aryan first wife and married a quarter-Jewish woman (see was very glamorous – see the photos). And he never issued political statements supporting the regime, as Boehm did. I think that a lot of the antipathy to Karajan is due to his arrogance, vanity and the great power he accumulated in German and Austrian musical life. His Nazi connections were much exaggerated in later years, esp. in the US. One scatterbrain claimed that he had divorced his partly-Jewish wife and married a purely-German woman – the opposite of the truth. Alas, this may have swayed Richard Tucker in his refusal to sing Manrico on the Karajan/Callas Trovatore, having been engaged to do so by Walter Legge (also Jewish). Had Tucker had access to more accurate information he might have seized the chance to take part in a major recording. He was replaced by Di Stefano, who was not up to the task. For that alone I will not forgive the exaggeration of Karajan’s Nazi past. Not that I condone joining that awful pagan cult (excuse the Catholic take on it). One cannot, of course, be sure. Tucker was very loyal to his Jewish heritage and might not have gone ahead anyway. But he seems to have originally agreed to take part. Osborne’s book is the status quaestionis, as academics used to say, on Karajan’s career and it deals with his Nazi party membership in detail. We should also recall Norman Davies’ comment in his history of Europe that we should not judge people who live under totalitarian systems by the same standards we apply to those who live in free societies.
Herbert von Karajan was a Nazi for a long time as NL has shown.
I’m amazed that Aachen didn’t know of this but it’s good to see them doing something now. It was pretty common knowledge in Herbies day.
As for those who claim this is ‘cancel culture’, people like Hitler and yes, Donald Trump, rely on others to make them ‘happy’ and workable.
There were much better people and role models to look to, many of them who were gifted conductors. Erich Kleiber was among them so was Furtwängler.
The world, including Aachen, has known about Karajan’s Nazi past for a long time, and Karajan clearly should have suffered some repercussions for this, while so much of the anger and diatribe has fallen on Wilhelm Furtwangler instead, who, even with the concessions he for the most part had no choice but to make, to continue to work in Germany and maintain what was valuable that he held dear, hated the Nazis. Needless to say, he faces a little more recrimination from Norman Lebrecht and from the Wallfisch’s than he has deserved – and while Karajan most frequently has been given a pass.
The grit and other Semitic qualities to Mahler’s writing, in especially the last three movements of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony goes AWOL in the 1982 recording of this by Karajan and the BPO and the final Adagio on it pays more allegiance, it sounds like to me, to Wagner’s Parsifal than it should. The two scherzos, already a little too slick on the 1980 pre-digital recording, are even more so in 1982.
While it would be pointless not to acknowledge Herbert von Karajan’s association with Nazi organizations (although his motivation for doing so is a controversial matter), I believe that removing his bust might not be the most constructive way to address his past. Canceling culture and artists for their personal life also precludes us from learning from their mistakes. The Nazi regime ended 78 years ago, and Karajan has been deceased for over 34 years now. It’s important to separate the artist from the person and recognize the complexity of Karajan’s contributions. Let’s focus on learning from history and building a future that promotes understanding and growth, rather than perpetuating judgments from the past. Canceling/removing/censoring is never the answer.
This lady, whose name nobody will remember a few years from now, is virtue signalling to the woke crowd. Sad, infuriating, but also a bit funny. In the big picture, she is just making a fool of herself. Someone much wiser than her, the late, great, Carlo Maria Giulini, had said this: ” It is very, very difficult to judge the position of a man…It is difficult to put yourself in a position, in a special moment (in history) that is impossible to imagine if you didn’t live in that time. The last thing I should do is express my position on this point. I had my personal political position…I was not a fascist, and at the moment I had to make a strong decision, and also a dangerous decision, I took it. But I am not in a position to do any criticism of another person.” https://drgeraldstein.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/a-man-who-refused-to-judge-carlo-maria-giulini/
Not that Carry on fella again. I thought his Mantovani act was over.
This Ms Tzavara decided to have her 15 minutes of fame, by following the woke mob and “cancelling” one of the greatest figures of 20th century music. What a sad, pathetic state of affairs. Karajan just wanted to save his career from ending before it had even begun. Many people did the same – and so would she, if she had been in HvK’s shoes. Instead of this embarrassing display of political correctness, she would be well advised to pay attention to what Toscanini had said (talking about Furtwängler): “It is very, very difficult to judge the position of a man… It is difficult to put yourself in a position, in a special moment (in history) that is impossible to imagine if you didn’t live in that time. The last thing I should do is express my position on this point. I had my personal political position… I was not a fascist, and at the moment I had to make a strong decision, and also a dangerous decision, I took it. But I am not in a position to do any criticism of another person”
Giulini, NOT Toscanini (lapsus during typing!)