For decades Circus Karajani, as west Berlin wags called it, was the best show in town. Its golden, tent-like concert hall is still home to the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra and was named after its postwar ringmaster of 34 years: chief conductor Herbert von Karajan.
Among his legions of fans were married Berlin-Jewish couple Max Wolffsohn and Thea Saalheimer whose families were decimated in the Holocaust. They made regular pilgrimages to Circus Karajani.
Afterwards, their son Michael remembered his mother’s refrain about the conductor: “He may have been a Nazi but, for one thing, he was just a small, meaningless cog and, for another, he is for me the best conductor in the world.”
Many around the world felt the same way about Karajan, who died in 1989 yet lives on through two distinct legacies. First: an unrivalled musical treasure trove thanks to a profitable collaboration of remarkable reach with the Deutsche Grammophon record label. Second: a reputation as an “ardent Nazi” that stuck like chewing gum to his metaphorical shoe.
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Michael Wolffsohn’s parents didn’t live to see their historian son’s recent one-night-only performance at Circus Karajani. He was presenting his new book about the conductor’s life, work and the choices behind both: Genius and Conscience: Herbert von Karajan between Music and National Socialism.
That evening, and in interviews since, Wolffsohn has described Karajan as a Nazi-era opportunist but never a true believer. And, with all guns blazing, he has denounced previous “Karajanazi” biographers as biased, lazy or both.
Born in Salzburg in 1908, the Austrian’s early career in neighbouring Germany benefited from the rise of anti-Semitism as a Nazi state ideology.
Vacancies for young conductors arose as Jewish maestros fled, while many orchestras Karajan faced in his earliest positions had already been “aryanised”, sparing him the task of firing Jewish musicians.
A 1938 Berlin concert – earning his first “Karajan Miracle” headline – saw the young conductor adopted as a favourite by senior Nazi Hermann Göring. A year later, though, he fell out of favour with Hitler after a disastrous performance of the dictator’s beloved Wagner went horribly wrong. Karajan made things worse by blaming a drunk baritone favoured by the Nazi leader.
Things continued in that vein for Karajan, Wolfssohn argues, with the facade of wartime success and collaboration at odds with a conflicted conductor battling precarious work contracts and open to blackmail because of his second wife’s “quarter-Jewish” label.
Critics suggest the Wolffsohn book is too indulgent of a conductor who followed the Nazi occupying forces into Paris to play three Bach concerts.
Some see a clue in how the study was commissioned by the Karajan Foundation headed by the conductor’s daughters, though Wolffsohn insists he had full research autonomy.
In Der Spiegel magazine, music professor Friedrich Geiger took issue with the historian’s litany of more than 30 Jewish artists, friends and musical collaborators of Karajan in the postwar years, as proof of his good character.
In this approach Geiger sees echoes of postwar exoneration efforts, where “the persecuted were in demand” to vouch for even distant acquaintances in so-called denazification trials.
There is no dispute that Karajan was an NSDAP (Nazi party) member, but Wolffsohn doesn’t see him as a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi.
Some remain silent, others risk everything but most people are weak
— Michael Wolffsohn, historian
And what of critics claims the conductor was an anti-Semite? Wolffsohn says he found no real evidence, bar two odious written remarks that he places in the column of contemporary cultural anti-Semitism as opposed to the more virulent – what he calls “liquidatory anti-Semitism” – column.
Though Wolffsohn’s book is often as temperamental as its subject, it raises questions about the intersection of art and politics in Karajan’s time that are relevant – and uncomfortable – today.
German writer Daniel Kehlmann did the same in a recent pre-Oscars essay in The New York Times about the slippery slope of opportunism and complicity. His expertise in the field comes from a recent novel about film pioneer Georg Pabst’s pact 90 years ago with the Nazi regime, and the silence of fascist-era German film stars.
“The question is not whether actors should become politicians,” wrote Kehlmann in remarks addressed to Academy Award nominees, “but whether citizens who happen to be very visible will, at a decisive movement, refuse to play the role that every authoritarian leader assigns them: decorative proof that all is well.”
Applying, then, his argument to this year’s Academy Awards: if red-carpet favourite Sydney Sweeney is problematic for cosying up to Maga Republicans to advance her career, is Ireland’s Jessie Buckley complicit for not using a worldwide audience to denounce Donald Trump?
While Kehlmann thinks yes, Wolffsohn says that an expectation or pressure on artists to be political is “intolerant”.
[ Sydney Sweeney’s jeans ad: How did we get to a culture war over this?Opens in new window ]
“Some remain silent, others risk everything but most people are weak,” he said. “Heroes are rare and strong mostly with words only and, above all, when no danger looms.”
Where he agrees with Kehlmann, though, is how regimes with totalitarian ambitions always move in quickly on culture – and its artists – to neutralise their power as a challenge to the new political reality.
“Karajan didn’t need the NSDAP, the NSDAP needed Karajan,” writes Wolffsohn, suggesting the Nazi regime “abused” the rising star as a glittering, musical distraction from the mass-murder machine operating in the pit.
In the end, Wolffsohn thinks Karajan was an irredeemable narcissist who lived in a “cuckoo-land of his ingenious music and took no notice of anything apart from that”.
As for today’s stars, Sweeney may have good jeans but, like Karajan, only time will tell if she had good judgment.
