'The Trapp Family' is certainly one of the German movies which had the
most after-effects in Hollywood. Now a remake tells the story of the
singing 'Sound of Music' family from a different angle. Will it work in
2015?
In 1956, the film "The Trapp Family," directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner
and starring Ruth Leuwerik and Hans Holt, became one of the most popular
films in post-war Germany. The film also had a sequel, "The Trapp
Family in America," which was released in 1958.
Most notably, the story of this singing family became a legend in the
US, as it was turned into a Broadway musical and an extremely successful
film, both called "The Sound of Music."
"The Trapp Family" was based on the memoir of Maria-Augusta von Trapp,
"The Story of the Trapp Family Singers," which describes how the family
escaped from Austria during Nazi rule to live in the US. The book became
a bestseller.
A few years later, Broadway producers became interested in the story.
The musical "The Sound of Music" premiered in New York in 1959. It ran
for almost 1,500 performances. Then a London production of the musical
was just as successful. The story has fans in many other countries, too,
especially in Asia.
The German actress Yvonne Catterfeld is Maria von Trapp in the new film
The most memorable and famous version of this story comes from
Hollywood. The film director Robert Wise adapted the musical, casting
Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in the lead roles. The nearly
three-hour musical drama obtained five Oscars and smashed box office
records in several countries.
Fifty years later, a German remake is being released, and premiered
Monday (02.11.15) in the Gloria Palast in Munich, which is where the
original film was also screened for the first time.
Filmmaker Ben Verbong tells a slightly different version of the
well-known story. In the original film in 1956, the memories of the
Maria von Trapp led the narrative: This time it is the oldest daughter,
Agatha von Trapp, who is at the center of the story. The emotional core
of the film remains similar to the original - a remix of kitsch
sentimental drama.
This is what it looked like in the 50s
This remake will probably not be as successful as the original version.
In the 1950s, moviegoers in Germany were yearning for entertainment
after the war. This new movie was filmed in the style of a German
evening soap - directly in English, apparently to conquer
an international audience.
The film "The Trapp Family - A Life of Music" directed by Ben
Verbong, starring Matthew Macfayden, Eliza Bennett, Yvonne Catterfeld,
Cornelius Obonya, and Rosemary Harris is released on November 12 in
Germany. A worldwide release is expected for the Christmas holidays.
...This woman was murdered twice, once at Hitler's request (and as thus, the only such American woman), and the second time by the cold war hysteria (a la Joe McCarthy), as key data was deliberately overlooked in order to try to pursue Communists among us.
Here's a new commemorative video, showing Mildred's translations of Goethe and especially showcasing her romance -- with her German, and with Germany.
This is a family story as well as a public one, and I'm proud that it has a satisfying ending, which can be a rarity in war stories.
Les Schrenk and his crew landed on what is now my cousin Niels Møller's farm in Denmark. Niels and his siblings remember their mother, my grandfather's youngest sister, mentioning having seen the plane go down, and also seeing the parachutes. She thought that one of them had landed in their pond. Another cousin, Nicolaj Bojer, visited Les Schrenk in Minnesota, and invited him to the family farm, where together they sleuthed out various artifacts from Les's downed plane, the Pot O' Gold. It was tireless research by Nicolaj that led to Hans-Hermann Müller, and his Heidelberg address." This is all in the PBS show (from Danish TV), Mortal Enemies, airing soon in New England on PBS.
A letter Nicolaj wrote to us announcing the Danish documentary, along with a link to the documentary itself (including footage of Schrenk visiting the family farm in 2008, and also of the reunion of the two "mortal enemies" in Heidelberg), are found here on this blog: http://deutsch-heute.blogspot.com/2013/03/wwii-wieder-neu-lester-schrenk-und-hans.html -- rsb
Undated
courtesy photo of Les Schrenk's "Pot O' Gold" B-17 bomber crew during
World War II. Shrenk is second from left in the back row. Schrenk, 91,
of Bloomington was in the plane when it was shot down over Denmark in
Feb.1944. Schrenk parachuted to safety and survived a German P.O.W.
camp. (Photo courtesy of Les Schrenk)
Les
Schrenk, 91, of Bloomington, photographed on Thursday, May 21, 2015. (Pioneer Press:
Scott Takushi)
Sunday night, Les Schrenk will watch a war story on TV -- about himself. The documentary "Mortal Enemies" will tell the tale of the act of mercy that haunted him for 68 years.
Schrenk, 91, is alive today because a German pilot mysteriously
spared his life during World War II. And he is at peace today because he
finally found out why -- after an odyssey spanning seven decades of
dogged research.
Schrenk said that when he finally met the pilot, he called it a
"reunion," as if they were long-lost friends. The meeting would be full
of answers for Schrenk, which he found satisfying. "This has finally come full circle. It's kind of the closure of
everything," said Schrenk, who will be watching the documentary in his
retirement home in Bloomington.
The following account of Schrenk's saga comes from the TV documentary, interviews, and military documents from World War II:
On Feb. 22, 1944, a squadron of bombers left England to attack Nazi
factories near Germany's Ruhr River. The mission was so important that
the Allies set up a simultaneous decoy attack to distract the Germans.
In the decoy squadron was a B-17 named Pot O' Gold. On the belly
of the plane was a gun turret, and inside it waited a machine-gunner --
Army Air Corps Sgt. Les Schrenk, 24, of Long Prairie, Minn.
The squadron roared over its target in German-occupied Denmark,
but cloud cover prevented it from dropping any bombs. As the planes
wheeled around to return home, a swarm of German aircraft attacked.
"The air was full of airplanes," Schrenk recalled Thursday. "I swear, some of them came within a few feet of us."
The Nazis shot three of the B-17s out of the sky, killing all 40 crew members. Then a German JU-88 swooped toward Schrenk.
"The first thing I remember was a great big explosion," he said.
He looked up at the right wing -- where a 25-foot plume of flame belched
from a fuel tank.
Undated
black and white courtesy photo, circa World War II of German pilot
Hans-Hermann Muller. Muller spared the life of Les Schrenk, of
Bloomington, Minn., along with the crew of Schrenk's B-17 bomber, when
he let them parachute safely to the ground after he shot down their
plane. The two men met in Muller's home in Heidelberg, Germany in 2012.
Photo courtesy of Les Schrenk.
On the plane's radio, someone asked: "Where's the nearest land?" The navigator replied: "Twenty minutes due east." This is it, thought Schrenk. Like blindfolded prisoners facing a firing squad, the crew waited for the final gunshots.
And waited. And waited.
But the German attacker had stopped firing. The crew was amazed
to see it assume a protective position, floating about 100 yards over
the crippled B-17.
Schrenk knew that falling into the icy North Atlantic was a death
sentence, but if his plane could reach land, he and his crewmates might
parachute to safety. It didn't seem likely. The flames went out and reignited, over
and over. "It was explosion, explosion, explosion for 20 minutes,"
Schrenk said. Just as the plane crossed the beach, the wing fell off. "Ten seconds earlier and I wouldn't be here today," he said.
The bomber spiraled down. The crew bailed out, their chutes popping open. As he swayed in the wind, Schrenk heard the crash of his plane
three miles away. Then he heard bullets buzzing past -- German ground
troops had opened fire. The 10-man crew landed without injury, with the exception of a pilot who fell into a lake and drowned.
Schrenk's boots had hardly touched the ground when the questions
hit him: What just happened? Why am I alive? Why didn't the pilot kill
us?
German troops quickly rounded up the American fliers and marched
them to a nearby schoolhouse. Schrenk would soon be sent to Stalag Luft 4
-- Airmen's Prison No. 4 -- in Lithuania. By that time, the Russian army was threatening from the east. Eventually, the camp's guards ordered the prisoners to evacuate. As they marched, Schrenk wondered about their destination. Days later, he realized there wasn't one. The guards were not taking them to another prison, but driving
them back and forth across snow-covered Germany like a herd of cattle. It was a death march that lasted three months. "If you couldn't keep up, you were shot," said Schrenk. His comrades died all around him. He was constantly on the verge of freezing and starving. He wore out the bottoms of his socks -- so only rings of cloth remained around his ankles.
This
P.O.W. spoon, with a Nazi design stamped in the handle, belongs to Les
Schrenk of Bloomington, who was in a B-17 bomber shot down over Denmark
during World War II. Schrenk parachuted to safety and survived a German
P.O.W. camp, photographed on Thursday, May 21, 2015. (Pioneer Press:
Scott Takushi)
He could see his toes wiggling out of his tattered shoes. "I was lucky," he said. "I was from Minnesota, and I knew about snow. Those guys from Florida had never seen a snowflake."
At night, the men wrote poetry. Schrenk carried a notebook
through the entire march -- and still has it. In it, a typical poem
"Discards" compares the starved men to "a broken bottle thrown away that
was once a bottle of beer."
Then, suddenly, the march was over. "One of the guards said, 'We are your prisoners now. You are free,' " remembers Schrenk. British troops had come to the POWs' rescue, but there was no celebration. In a hunger-induced stupor, Schrenk took hours to realize what
happened. "We could hardly put one foot in front of the other," he said.
Schrenk was one of thousands of liberated prisoners, and their
sheer numbers overwhelmed the Allied forces. "Our own government didn't
come to get us," he said. The liberators told the ex-POWs their ordeal still wasn't over: They had to walk 13 miles more to another camp .
The British did give Schrenk clothing -- a British uniform, which
turned out to be a stroke of luck. After days of trying to get U.S.
forces to help, Schrenk donned the uniform and approached an American
airman, who naturally assumed Schrenk was British. Schrenk finagled his
way onto a transport plane and landed in England.
That's when the war ended.
Schrenk returned to America with two Purple Hearts, moved to Edina, got married and lived in the same house for 56 years.
Yet the big question never left him.
He'd look at his wife and friends, and wondered where they would be if the German pilot had not spared him. He'd look at his daughter, who wouldn't have been born. The questions became an obsession, and he began his search for
the only man who had the answers: the German pilot who had shot down his
plane.
Despite a barrage of letters and phone calls, he made no
progress. "The German government was absolutely not helpful," Schrenk
said. "Everything was classified."
Eventually, a Danish friend, Nikolaj Bojer, came to his aid. And
after four years of cutting through the red tape with his help, Schrenk
finally found the name. It was Hans-Herrmann Muller.
Schrenk found a phone number and arranged a meeting. A Danish TV
crew picked up the story and began to film him. In 2012, the two men met
in Muller's alpine home in Heidelberg, Germany.
Schrenk thanked Muller and handed the German a .50-caliber bullet, which he had recovered from the site of his wrecked B-17.
"I am very glad I didn't give it to you back then," Schrenk told him.
Then it was Muller's turn. He tried to say what Schrenk had
waited 68 years to hear -- the reason Schrenk was standing in front of
him. Muller was a battle-hardened ace who downed 16 enemy aircraft
during the war. But after crippling Schrenk's plane, he felt a sudden
pang of conscience.
"It would have been foolish to shoot down aircraft over the sea.
They'd have no chance of survival," Muller said in the documentary.
Instead, he escorted the flaming B-17 to shore. "When I saw that
all 10 jumped out with their parachutes, I must say -- it may be too
much to call it happiness -- I did feel a kind of satisfaction."
But why?
Only minutes before, Muller had mercilessly machine-gunned
another B-17 into the Atlantic. Why not do the same for the Pot O' Gold? The only explanation -- the conclusion of Schrenk's epic saga -- was a split-second decision. But that was enough.
Schrenk felt satisfied and basked in the warmth of a new friendship. "It was like seeing a friend from old times," Schrenk said. "I will like him forever, and that is what he tells me, too."
Toasting each other with champagne, the men look in the
documentary as jovial as a pair of aging Rotarians. But their smiles
couldn't hide the fact that this was a curious kind of friendship.
Their last meeting was two generations earlier, in midair, as they desperately tried to kill each other.
Both knew their friendship would seem strange to others, and both felt the need to explain.
Friendship is personal, they said, but war is not.
They never thought of conducting war in terms of killing people. They never thought of their victims at all. "If I had thought about it, I certainly wouldn't have been able to manage 16 shootdowns," Muller said. "You were happy after a successful shootdown. But how many people
and who would be in there?" he said. "We didn't care about that at all,
because then we wouldn't have been able to attack more rigorously."
Schrenk agreed. "If you shot a plane down, it was more like just:
'Hooray! I scored a victory!' There was no feeling, really. You are
shooting at each other. You are trying to keep yourself from being
killed."
Schrenk, who lives with his wife, Bernice, in the Bloomington
retirement home, said he still regularly calls Muller. The friendship
continues. And the explanation of the friendship continues, too.
"People who don't understand war ask me: 'Why don't you hate
him?' " Schrenk said. "If I would hate the pilot that shot us down,
would it hurt him? No. He wouldn't know I was hating him. Who would it hurt the most? Me. It would make me a bitter person."
As he folded the pages of his poetry notebook, he said, "It is much, much better to put the past the behind and move forward."
"Mortal Enemies," the story of World War II veteran Les Schrenk of
Minnesota, will air at 6:30 p.m. Sunday on Twin Cities Public
Television. The documentary was produced by Danish TV and brought to
Minnesota with support from the Danish American Center and Danish
Consulate.
Les
Schrenk, left, of Bloomington, Minn. shakes hands with the German
fighter pilot who spared his life in World War II -- Hans-Hermann
Muller. The two met in Muller's home in Heidelberg, Germany in 2012.
Photo courtesy of Twin Cities Public Television.
Enjoy the trailer... It's already playing at the Showcase Cinema; will be released nationwide on 4/10.
APRIL 02, 2015 5:03 PM ET Ella Taylor
Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds star in Woman in Gold.
Robert Viglasky/Weinstein Company
Gustav Klimt's famous painting of a dark-eyed beauty encased in shimmering gold lozenges is often dismissed by art critics as a disappointing excursion into kitsch by the avant-garde Austrian painter. But the portrait, commissioned by a wealthy Jewish family not long before the outbreak of World War II, has brought visceral pleasure to countless owners of postcards, posters and key-rings who have yet to set foot in New York's Neue Galerie, where the original hangs today. How it got there from Vienna makes for a sensational true-life tale, however staidly told in the new film Woman in Gold. To Maria Altmann, an elderly Los Angeles Jewish dress-shop owner played in the movie by Helen Mirren,Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauerwas a precious reminder of her glamorous and beloved Aunt Adele, lost forever in the wake of Nazi art theft. Before her premature death, Bloch-Bauer had bequeathed the painting to Vienna's prestigious Belvedere art gallery. Soon after, the painting, along with many other artifacts owned by her family, was brazenly looted by Austrian Nazis; Maria was one of the few in her family who escaped death and ended up in the Untied States. After the War the painting resurfaced and remained in Vienna's prestigious Belvedere gallery for six decades until Altmann — with the help of a young attorney who happened to be the grandson of émigré composer Arnold Schoenberg, a contemporary of Klimt — returned to try to reclaim her family property. The epic legal fight that followed is the subject ofWoman in Gold, a stolidly sequential drama by British director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn). With a directing style best described as reverently ceremonial, Curtis plods through scenic tours of the baroque architectural grandeur of Vienna today, regularly punctuated with flashbacks to the traumatic wrecking of Maria's gilded youth. Dancing thehoraat Maria's wedding comes with a thudding overlay of Nazi jackboots. On the soundtrack, lest you miss the message, is "O Mary, don't you weep." With star power more in mind than goodness of fit, the movie is hopelessly miscast. Mirren is her usual entertaining blast of acerbic brio, but here she improbably reprises her QEII testiness, accessorized with an Austrian accent. For his part Ryan Reynolds, a terrific physical comedian, is all wrong for the earnestly idealistic Randy Schoenberg, who found a novel way to help Maria sue the Austrian government for recovery of a painting it had now recast as a symbol of the country's national identity. How they accomplished this is such a great yarn that, for all its broad brush strokes,Woman in Goldcan't help but tell a moving populist parable about the will to power of an ordinary woman — one among millions, it turns out as the restitution of wartime cultural theft becomes a very big deal in the art world — taking on powerful institutions to regain a tiny fraction of her family's appalling losses. To the credit of screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell and a nice turn by Daniel Bruhl as an Austrian investigative journalist with a guilty secret he is driven to expunge,Woman in Golddoes not shy away from Austria's reluctance to face up to its wartime record. Instead, the film suggests that the affirmation of national pride that moved Austrian officials to fight Maria's claim tooth and nail depended on a sustained denial of its own shameful history. After a Herculean struggle, in the end an Austrian arbitration committee did right by Altmann, who sold Klimt'sAdeleto cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder for a fortune and donated most of the proceeds to arts institutions and Holocaust survivors' groups. There it hangs in New York, a refugee like its rightful owner — and an enduring testament to the Austrian back-story that never made it intoThe Sound of Music.
Movie Synopsis
Sixty years after she fled Vienna during World War II, an elderly Jewish woman, Maria Altmann, starts her journey to retrieve family possessions seized by the Nazis, among them Klimt's famous painting 'The Lady in Gold'. Together with her inexperienced but plucky young lawyer Randy Schoenberg, she embarks upon a major battle which takes them all the way to the heart of the Austrian establishment and the U.S. Supreme Court, and forces her to confront difficult truths about the past along the way.
Cast:
Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, Katie Holmes, Tatiana Maslany
Danke, Alli. Ich besuchte selbst die Georg-August Uni in Göttingen, und bin stolz, dass Dr. Noether dort eine Lehrstelle als Professorin fand. http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/noether.htm -- From Agnes Scott College: Biographies of Women Mathematicians
Emmy Noether
March 23, 1882 - April 14, 1935
Written by Mandie Taylor, Class of 1998 (Agnes Scott College)
Traditionally, people consider mathematicians to be men. However, throughout history, there have been many women
mathematicians who have contributed just as much as their
male-counterparts, and
their contributions to mathematics have not been forgotten. One of these women
mathematicians was German-born Emmy Noether.
Emmy Noether was born in Erlangen, Germany on March 23, 1882. She was
named Amalie, but always called "Emmy". She was the eldest of four
children, but one of only two that survived childhood. Her brother, Fritz
also made a career of mathematics. Her father was Max Noether, a noted
mathematician of his time. Her mother was Ida Amalie, for whom Emmy was
named.
As a child, Emmy Noether did not concentrate on mathematics. She spent her
time in school studying languages, with a concentration on French and
English. Her mother taught her the traditional skills of a young woman of
that time. She learned to cook, clean, and play the clavier. At the time
of her graduation from high school, she passed a test that allowed her to
teach both French and English at schools for young women.
At the age of 18, Emmy Noether decided to take classes in mathematics at
the University of Erlangen. Her brother, Fritz, was a student there, and
her father was a professor of mathematics. Because she was a woman, the
university refused to let Emmy Noether take classes They granted her
permission to audit classes. She sat in on classes for two years, and then
took the exam that would permit her to be a doctoral student in
mathematics. She passed the test, and finally was a student in good
standing at the University. After five more years of study, she was
granted the university's second degree to a woman in the field of mathematics; the
first had graduated one year earlier.
Now that Emmy Noether had her doctorate in mathematics, she was ready to
find a job teaching. The University of Erlangen would not hire her, as
they had a policy against women professors. She decided to help her father
at the Mathematics Institute in Erlangen. She began doing research there,
and helped her father by teaching his classes when he was sick. Soon, she
began to publish papers on her work.
During the ten years Emmy worked with her father, Germany became involved
in World War I. Emmy was a pacifist at heart, and hated the war. She
longed for a Germany that was not at war. In 1918, her wish was granted,
as the war ended. The German monarchy was removed and the country became a
republic. Noether, and all women in Germany, were given the right to vote
for the first time. Even with the new rights granted to women, Noether was
not paid for her work teaching.
During this time, Felix Klein and David Hilbert were working on further
defining one of Einstein's theories at the University of Gottingen. They
felt that Emmy Noether's expertise could help them in their work. They
asked her to come and join then, but since there were no women on the
faculty, Noether was unsure if she would be welcome. Many of the faculty
did not want her there, but in the end, she came. She worked hard and soon
was given a job as a lecturer. Even though she still was not paid for her
efforts, for the first time, Noether was teaching under her own name.
Three years later, she began receiving a small salary for her work.
During her time at the University of Gottingen, she accumulated a small
following of students known as Noether's boys. These students traveled
from as far as Russia to study with her. Noether was a warm person who
cared deeply about her students. She considered her students to be like
family and was always willing to listen to their problems. Her teaching
style was very difficult to follow, but those who caught on to her fast
style became loyal followers. Noether's teaching method led her students
to come up with ideas of their own, and many went on to become great
mathematicians themselves. Many credited Noether for her part in teaching
them to teach themselves.
Peace-loving Noether was soon to wish for peace again. In 1933, Hitler
and
the Nazis came into power in Germany. The Nazis demanded that all Jews
be
thrown out of the universities. Noether's brother, Fritz, who was also a
professor at the time, accepted an offer to teach in Siberia. Even though friends tried to get Emmy a position at
the
University of Moscow, she opted to move to the United States, where Bryn
Mawr College offered her a position teaching. [The appointment of Noether
was made possible by a gift from the Institute of International
Education and the Rockefeller Foundation.]
Teaching
at a women's college was very different for Noether, where, for the first time,
she had female colleagues. Anna Pell Wheeler, another mathematician, was the head of the department at Bryn Mawr, and became a
great friend of Noether. Wheeler understood about how Emmy had had to struggle
to have a career in mathematics in Germany, and also about the difficulties of being uprooted from
her homeland and family. Noether kept up her charismatic teaching style, as a caring and compassionate teacher, even while occasionally lapsing into German if her ideas weren't getting across to her students.
Noether's
death in 1935 surprised nearly everyone, as she had told only her closest
friends of her illness.
Emmy Noether made many contributions to the field of mathematics. She
spent her time studying abstract algebra, with special attention to rings,
groups, and fields. Because of her unique look on topics, she was able to
see relationships that traditional algebra experts could not. She
published over 40 papers in her lifetime. She was also a teacher who was
able to inspire her students to make their own contributions to the field
of mathematics.
April, 1995
References
Angier, Natalie. "The Mighty Mathematician You've Never Heard Of,"
New York Times Science section, page D4, March 27, 2012 (print edition).
Available online March 26, 2012.
Noether, Gottfried. "Emmy Noether," in Women of Mathematics, A
Biobibliographic Sourcebook, Louise Grinstein and Paul Campbell,
Editors, Greenwood Press, 1987.
Noether, Emiliana Pasca. "Emmy Noether," in Complexities: Women in Mathematics, Bettye Anne Case and Anne Leggett, Editors, Princeton University Press (2005), 30-37.
Morrow, James. "Emmy Noether," in Notable Women in Mathematics: A Biographical Dictionary, Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl, Editors, Greenwood Press (1998), 152-157.
Olsen, Lynn M. Women in Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 1974.
Perl, Teri. Women in Mathematics, Lives of Women Mathematicians, plus
Discovery Activities, World Wide Publishing, 1993.
Noether, Emiliana P. "Emmy Noether: Twentieth Century Mathematician and Woman," AWM Newsletter, Vol. 6, No. 7 (Nov.-Dec. 1976), 1-6.
Smith, Martha K. "Emmy Noether's Contributions to Mathematics," AWM Newsletter, Vol. 6, No. 7 (Nov.-Dec. 1976), 6-10.
Profile in the "Emmy Noether Lectures," Association for Women in
Mathematics.
Kimberling, C. "Emmy Noether," American Mathematical Monthly 79 (1972), 136-149. [JSTOR, subscription required]
Kimberling, C. "Emmy Noether and her influence," in Emmy Noether: A
Tribute to her Life and Work, James W. Brewer and Martha K. Smith,
Editors, M. Dekker, New York, 1981.
Kimberling, C. "Emmy Noether, Greatest Woman Mathematician,"
Mathematics Teacher 84 no. 3 (March 1982), 246-249. (Available at the
Houghton Mifflin web site http://www.matharticles.com under section 10.1 in the drop down menus.)
Srinivasan B. and J. Sally. Emmy Noether in Bryn Mawr: Proceedings
of a Symposium, Springer-Verlag, 1983.
Richard von Weizsäcker, a onetime soldier in Hitler’s army who used
his largely ceremonial office as president of Germany to denounce his
country’s Nazi past and to condemn intolerance toward immigrants and
other minorities, died Jan. 31. He was 94.
His death was announced by the office of the current German president, Joachim Gauck, but no other details were available.
Mr.
von Weizsäcker was elected president of West Germany in 1984 and held
the office as the country’s formal head of state for 10 years. During
that time, he helped oversee the country’s reunification with East
Germany in 1990.
In the German parliamentary system, the chancellor is the head of
government and exercises more authority over the policies of the
government than the president does. (Helmut Kohl was Germany’s
chancellor throughout Mr. von Weizsäcker’s tenure as president.)
Nonetheless,
the aristocratic, white-haired Mr. von Weizsäcker became perhaps the
most popular political figure in Germany. He was, in essence, his
country’s chief ambassador and used his presidential office as a
platform to promote important matters of national and moral principle.
In
an address to the parliament on May 8, 1985 — the 40th anniversary of
Germany’s surrender at the end of World War II — Mr. von Weizsäcker
directed a cleansing spotlight on the country’s greatest national shame,
when he challenged his fellow Germans to take responsibility for the
horrors of the Holocaust. He dismissed the commonly held notion that
ordinary German citizens were not aware of the actions of the Nazi
regime.
“There were many ways of not burdening one’s conscience,
of shunning responsibility, looking away, keeping mum,” he said. “When
the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of
the war, all too many of us claimed they had not known anything about it
or even suspected anything. “Who could remain unsuspecting after
the burning of the synagogues, the plundering, the stigmatization of
the Star of David, the deprivation of rights, the ceaseless violation of
human dignity?”
Mr. von Weizsäcker, who spent seven years as an infantry officer in
the German army during the war, was a potent symbol of national
reflection and reconciliation. “Anyone who closes his eyes to the past,” he said, “is blind to the present.”
He
called on Germans to view May 8 not as a day of national surrender but
as “a day of liberation. It freed us all from the system of National
Socialist tyranny.”
Mr.
von Weizsäcker’s forthright speech echoed around the world, and he was
widely hailed as his country’s moral conscience. He traveled to Israel
in 1985, attended the German premiere of the film “Schindler’s List”
with the Israeli ambassador and, in 1993, visited the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington.
“President Weizsäcker has had a major, positive influence in
enhancing Germany’s role and reputation on the world stage,” U.S.
ambassador to Germany Richard C. Holbrooke said in 1994.
Mr.
Weizsäcker repeatedly spoke out against intolerance toward immigrants
and other minorities and attended memorial services for Turkish victims
of neo-Nazi violence.
He also took a leading role in preparing
Germany for reunification after the country had been divided at the end
of World War II. As the mayor of West Berlin in the early 1980s, Mr. von
Weizsäcker was the first leader from the democratic western part of
the country to cross the border and conduct talks with his counterparts
in the communist-controlled eastern sector of Berlin.
As early
as 1985, he urged Germans on both sides of the divide to think of
themselves as one nation, and he was among the first leaders to call for
the national capital to return to Berlin.
Richard Karl von
Weizsäcker was born April 15, 1920, in a family castle in Stuttgart,
Germany. He was from an aristocratic family of statesmen, theologians
and scholars and had the inherited title of Freiherr, or baron.
His
father, Ernst von Weizsäcker, was a senior official in the Nazi
foreign ministry and served as the German ambassador to the Vatican. An
older brother, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, was part of a team of
German scientists that tried unsuccessfully to develop a nuclear bomb
during World War II.
Mr. von Weizsaecker studied in his teens at
the University of Oxford in England and the University of Grenoble in
France. He entered the German army in 1938 and took part in the German
invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the act that touched off World War
II.
Two days later, his older brother Heinrich was killed in battle,
which deeply affected Mr. von Weizsäcker’s view of the war. Stationed
on the eastern front in Russia in 1943, Mr. von Weizsäcker later
recalled, he and other German officers shot holes in a portrait of
Hitler. Several of his friends participated in a failed plot to
assassinate Hitler in 1944.
After the war, Mr. von Weizsäcker
studied law at Germany’s University of Göttingen and joined his
father’s defense team during the Nuremberg trials, when his father was
charged with war crimes. Ernst von Weizsäcker was sentenced to prison
and released after 18 months.
Mr. von Weizsäcker received a
doctorate in law and worked for a German industrial conglomerate before
being elected to the German parliament in 1969. He was mayor of West
Berlin from 1981 to 1984.
Survivors include his wife of 61 years, Marianne Viktoria Armgard Helene Doria Freifrau von Weizsäcker, née vonKretschmann (born 17 May 1932 in Essen); and three children.
Mr. von Weizsäcker wrote several books about history and politics in which he advocated a moderate, centrist approach for Germany as it entered the 21st century.
When
he left the presidency in 1994, he reflected on the powerful speech he
had delivered nine years earlier, in which he asked Germans to own up to
the legacy of the Holocaust. “I wouldn’t take back a single word of that speech today,” he said.
Hier follows a newspaper story which shows how WWII can still affect Germans today. *Note: DLRG is the Deutsche Lebensrettungsgesellschaft, the German Lifesaving Society. They certify "Freischwimmen" and various other swimming Levels, and organize most life guard services on natural banks and beaches.
Eckhard Kuhn-Osius
German Department
Hunter College, CUNY
Gefährliche Verwechslung Jacke von Nordsee-Urlauberin brennt plötzlich
St. Peter-Ording - Eine Urlauberin aus Westfalen, die beim Spaziergang am
Strand von St. Peter-Ording Steine sammelte, bekam den Schreck ihres Lebens,
als plötzlich ihre Jacke Feuer fing.
In die Tasche der Jacke hatte die Frau auch einen Phosphorbrocken gesteckt,
den sie für Bernstein hielt. Kurz darauf habe die Jacke gebrannt, teilte die
Polizei mit. Der Ehemann habe vergeblich versucht, den Fund aus der Jacke zu
holen. Schließlich musste die Frau ihre Jacke ausziehen.
Beide Beteiligte erlitten Brandverletzungen und wurden ambulant behandelt.
Das Paar aus Bielefeld konnte anschließend in sein Hotel zurückkehren, sagte ein
Polizeisprecher am Sonntag.
Der Fund vom Samstag war demnach offenbar ein Klumpen Phosphor, der sich nach
dem Trocknen unter Kontakt mit Sauerstoff selbst entzündet hatte. Nach
Polizeiangaben kam es in der Vergangenheit landesweit vereinzelt zu Unfällen
mit Phosphor, den Sammler für Bernstein oder Ähnliches hielten.
Die britische Luftwaffe nutzte die Chemikalie im Zweiten Weltkrieg als Füllung für
Brandbomben. Überreste davon werden noch immer angespült oder freigelegt.
Nach dem jüngsten Vorfall habe das DLRG* den Strandbereich in St. Peter-Ording
bei Ebbe nach weiteren Phosphor-Resten abgesucht. „Die Strandaufsicht ist
jetzt sensibilisiert und wird in den folgenden Tagen besonders aufmerksam auf
verdächtige Objekte achten“, sagte der Polizeisprecher.
Erst wenige Tage zuvor hatte sich ein achtjähriges Mädchen beim Steinesammeln am Plöner See mit brennendem Phosphor verletzt. Das Kind war mit Verbrennungen
an den Oberschenkeln ins Krankenhaus gekommen. Die Schülerin habe den
vermeintlichen Stein beim Spaziergang in die Hosentasche gesteckt, wo er zu
brennen begann.
Can you spot the odd verbs -- using Indirekte Rede -- when reporting what others have said? The use of "habe" other than for "ich" is one giveaway. --rsb
Amid the Rap Music, Echoes of an Orchestra Playing in a Dark Past
Survivor of Auschwitz Ensemble Teams Up With German Hip-Hop Duo
Video
Play Video|0:51
Esther Bejarano, a survivor of the Auschwitz
concentration camp, may be the last thing you’d expect in a hip-hop
singer. She uses her music to spread a message against fascism.
Credit Heribert Proepper/Associated Press
BERLIN — AT various points during shows, the German rapper Kutlu Yurtseven gestures to a bandmate
sitting demurely off to the side. That’s the cue for 89-year-old Esther
Bejarano, a diminutive woman with a snow-white pixie cut, to jump in with a song.
“When will the heavens open up, again, for me?” is one favorite, the
refrain of a local carnival tune. “When will they open up?”
It
is an unusual pairing. Ms. Bejarano is one of the last surviving
members of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, the only all-female ensemble
among the many Nazi-run prisoner musical groups in the camp system.
Among other duties, the Girls’ Orchestra was responsible for playing the
marches that imprisoned women had to keep step to as they went out to
work in the morning and, even more cruelly, as they returned, half-dead,
at the end of the day.
Five
years ago, hoping to reach more young people with her story and her
message of tolerance and anti-fascism, Ms. Bejarano teamed up with
Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop duo with Turkish and Italian roots.
They have released their first album, and have been playing concerts
throughout Germany and Europe ever since.
The
music combines songs like the poignant Yiddish resistance song, “We’ll
Live Forever,” composed in the Nazi-run Jewish ghetto in Vilna just
before it was liquidated, with rap passages about current problems like
racism that, in Ms. Bejarano’s view, show that the lessons of the
Holocaust still need to be learned.
Performances
always begin with Ms. Bejarano reading aloud from her autobiography,
which tells the story of a life shaped by two forces: the Nazis and
music.
Ms.
Bejarano was born Esther Loewy in Saarlouis, in what is now
southwestern Germany, in 1924. Her parents had met in Berlin as
teenagers, when her father was hired as a piano teacher for her mother,
and the two fell in love. “I picture it as having been very lovely,” Ms.
Bejarano said with a smile.
Hitler’s
rise to power put an end to what Ms. Bejarano described as “a
lighthearted childhood.” By the time she was 16, she was separated from
her family and interned in a Nazi work camp outside Berlin. Her parents,
she learned later, were deported the same year to Riga, Latvia, where
they were shot.
In
1943, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her hair was cut off, and
she was tattooed and forced to do backbreaking labor. For extra food,
she sometimes sang songs by Schubert, Bach or Mozart for barracks
leaders.
The
Nazis regarded camp orchestras as status symbols, and, within a month
of Ms. Bejarano’s arrival in Auschwitz, Maria Mandl, the SS commander in
charge of the women’s camp, decided that she, too, wanted one.
When
approached, Ms. Bejarano said she could play the piano. There was no
piano, she was told, but they needed an accordion player. “I had never
held an accordion in my hands, before,” Ms. Bejarano said. “But I said I
could play one.”
It worked, and she was accepted into the orchestra. “To this day I can’t believe that I did it.”
In
addition to entertaining SS officers with popular ditties or classical
selections, the Girls’ Orchestra also had to play for new detainees
arriving for the gas chambers. Often, people smiled and waved at the
musicians. “They must have thought, ‘Where music is playing, things
can’t be that bad,’ ” Ms. Bejarano said. “They didn’t know where they
were going. But we knew. We played with tears in our eyes.”
BECAUSE
fewer female than male prisoners could play musical instruments,
members of the orchestra received somewhat better treatment than their
male counterparts, and Ms. Bejarano was able to survive two serious
illnesses.
After
six months in Auschwitz, new regulations allowed her to transfer to a
labor camp because she had a Christian grandmother. During a forced
march in the last days of the war, she and several friends hid in the
woods and escaped. After a few harrowing months traveling Germany on
foot, dodging Russian soldiers and searching for her family, she
acquired false papers and boarded a ship headed to what was then British
Palestine. There, she reunited with her sister, Tosca.
While
some who played in the camps and survived never touched an instrument
again, for Ms. Bejarano, there was never any question: As soon as she
left Germany, she began training as a singer. “Some people say, after
Auschwitz, you can’t write any more poems, there can’t be music,
beautiful pictures,” she said. “I think that’s completely wrong. We have
to express to people what happened to us.”
For
many years, though, Ms. Bejarano was unable to talk about her time in
the camps. In Israel, where she settled, she sang in an award-winning
workers’ choir, and gave hundreds of concerts as a soldier in the army.
She met and married Nissim Bejarano, a truck driver whose family had
immigrated from Bulgaria. They had two children. She taught local
children to play the recorder.
But, in 1960, after much soul searching, the Bejarano family left for Germany: Her husband had fought during the 1956 Suez crisis
and was morally opposed to further armed conflict with Israel’s
neighbors. Settled in Hamburg, Ms. Bejarano had no time for music. She
cared for her small children and later, with her husband, ran a laundry
service.
It
was not until the 1970s that she decided to break her silence, after
witnessing the German police shield right-wing extremists against
protesters. “The next day, I joined the Association of the Persecutees
of the Nazi Regime,” she said. There, other members encouraged her to
tell her story, and to return to music.
SHE
spoke at schools. She joined two bands, singing Jewish resistance and
antiwar songs with her children. She delivered protest speeches at
neo-Nazi marches. A recurring nightmare of being trampled by Nazi
soldiers’ boots finally ceased. “I freed myself, inwardly,” she said.
Rap
is still not her favorite genre, but Ms. Bejarano likes her bandmates’
lyrics and is glad for the chance to reach a younger audience. Last
year, for example, she spoke out against the tragedy near Lampedusa, an
island off the coast of Italy where hundreds of African migrants fleeing war and poverty drowned en route to Europe.“You
have to help people like this,” she said. “I know it from my sister
Ruth. She made it to Switzerland, but the border guards turned her back.
The Germans shot her.”
The
plight of modern-day refugees is just one of many problems that keeps
Ms. Bejarano singing — in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, English, French and
Romany, the language of the Roma, or Gypsies. “I use music to act
against fascism,” she said. “Music is everything for me.”
Christa
Spannbauer, a filmmaker and journalist, said that the musicians’ work
makes it easier for young people to engage with the past constructively.
“If you just see the documentaries, you lose hope,” said Ms.
Spannbauer, whose own father was in the Waffen-SS as a teenager. “But
when you see the courage of the people who survived, it gives you hope
in humanity and strength to act. The kids see her and say, ‘O.K., we
want to do something.’ ”
Last
year, Ms. Bejarano added the Order of Merit, one of Germany’s most
important medals, to the many honors she has received. Soon, she and the
band will head to Istanbul. “I am always on the road,” she said,
shaking her head.
For
Mr. Yurtseven of the Microphone Mafia, every concert with Ms. Bejarano
is an inspiration. “Sometimes I’m kind of tired,” he said. “Then I look
at Esther, and think, ‘O.K., don’t tell yourself you’re tired. She’s 89
and still fighting for a better world.’ ”
A version of this article appears in print on June 28, 2014, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Amid the Rap Music, Echoes of an Orchestra Playing in a Dark Past.
"VERGESSEN kann man nie," so, Esther Bejarano im Interview.
The German actress Yvonne Catterfeld is Maria von Trapp in the new film
This is what it looked like in the 50s
