As I was reminded on a recent
visit to Dresden, German men love to sing shoulder-to-shoulder. And you love
hearing them. You can almost love them,
there in their white shirts, banked before the crowd in the Schlossplatz,
singing those German songs, some so robust and some, ah, the lieder, so tender.
Images linger in the mind,
especially the tender ones, and the one I have of the white-shirts, eyes
fastened on their leader, singing there in the sun of the music festival,
drawing out the sweet notes, has stayed with me ever since. And, as lingering
images do, it has made trouble for entering images, a kind of trouble that, I
think, is in this case worth sharing and looking into.
First I would like to have you
fix firmly in your mind the entering image. It gets in via the famous photo
album documenting the happy, normal life of the officers running the Auschwitz
camp — their picnics, their dinners, their Christmas-tree decorations, their
hiking. Leading the intrusion is a photo of them singing. They are banked on a
hillside, following the accordionist below them, singing their hearts out.
There's your image. Then the lingering image, of white shirts in Dresden. It
comes up and imposes, or superimposes, itself. I hope you're hearing its
challenge: "There's not room in this mind for both of us."
OK, I say, the mind belongs to
me. I'll settle this. What we're seeing is what's going to be in every normal
mind when the images of those storm troopers, brown shirts, enter. They must,
the normal mind says, be entirely different from the lingering group. They are
different human beings. Or at least different Germans. They are monsters. But
how can monsters do such normal things? How can they be happy? How can they
sing such sweet songs?
I think the normal mind knows
what it has to do. It's not going to get rid of either one of those images. It
just has to stretch. "Come on, mind, get yourself around the extremes of
human nature." I think I've settled it.
But the human mind, you know. It
wants to go to extremes. That's what my mind did and what I, for a test, am
going to ask yours to do. I supplied sound
to the image. Almost by accident. Here's how it happened. One of the songs on
my random-play is Rheinberger's "Abendlied." It's the only one on
five CD's where the sound, at particular places, draws the word
"heavenly" out of me. It might well draw it out of you. And what I can't
help doing now is putting in my ears those sounds as I look at that SS album
picture. Those killers are singing the "Abendlied"! I'm there. I'm
listening.
Of course I'm making myself a
guinea pig in a thought experiment. "OK, zoom in on the faces. Get the
mouths, the eyes. Now feed in the sound. Is 'heavenly' coming out of him?"
And I may not be a good, or representative, guinea pig. So I'm asking for
volunteers. Go to http://isurvived.org/InTheNews/Auschwitz-SSguards_floric.html
for the picture, then go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuRpHnz2ZJo&list=RDnuRpHnz2ZJo
- t=10 for the sound. If you copy the picture you can look at it while you
play the music. (Don't worry that the SS probably wouldn't be singing the song;
it just has to be possible.) Then
tell me, by email at hswardson@yahoo.com how it went. Is this within your
conception of human nature? of the enjoyment of music? of art? Did "heavenly"
come out of you?
The experimenter is interested
in whether or not you were able to make the stretch. If you have any other
observations that might be useful to him please send them.
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