Music for the Dead

This past Friday night, my wife Ruth and I attended a concert at the Belle Mehus Auditorium in Bismarck. It was an unusual performance. The music was based on Verdi’s Requiem and the performance was given by musicians from the Bismarck-Mandan Symphony Orchestra and a choir composed of members from the Bismarck-Mandan Civic Chorus and the Bismarck State College Concert Choir. However, that’s not particularly unusual. The strange part was the piece they performed – Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín. That would be Terezin, the WWII concentration camp.
 
So, what was the concert about? If I may borrow the description provided by the Bismarck-Mandan Symphony Orchestra.
 

The signature concert of The Defiant Requiem Foundation, Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín, tells the story of the courageous Jewish prisoners in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp (Terezín) during World War II who performed Verdi’s Requiem while experiencing the depths of human degradation. With only a single smuggled score, they performed the celebrated oratorio sixteen times, including one performance before senior SS officials from Berlin and an International Red Cross delegation. Conductor Rafael Schächter told the choir, “We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them."
 

To say it was moving would be an understatement. It was actually multimedia, with pictures and film from the camp, narration of Schächter’s thoughts, and video recordings of prisoners who had been part of the Terezin choir. As the performance ended, there were not many dry eyes, and a few people at the end were audibly sobbing over what they had just seen and heard. This was not a date night event!
 
As I’ve noted before, both Ruth and my families have personal ties to WWII and concentration camps. Ruth’s great-grandfather hid over 300 Jews during the war and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, never to return again. It was the same fate for his son and grandson. My grandfather was part of the underground, creating false documents for fleeing Jews and also hiding them in his home. My father was a fugitive during the war, to avoid being sent to forced labor in Germany, also effectively a death sentence. Yes, it was personal.
 
While the performance was very moving, I kept thinking, how did it come to this? What went wrong to cause these artists,musicians, tradesmen, and every imaginable type of person to be imprisoned? The obvious answer is that the Nazi regime waged war and imprisoned millions of Jews and other “subversives” as part of its extermination campaign. But let’s go further back.
 
Asummary from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museumexplains the political atmosphere and events that led to the Nazis coming into power. Here are select passages that paint a picture of the circumstances surrounding this shift in political control.

In the Reichstag (parliament) elections of May 2, 1928, the Nazis received only 2.6 percent of the national vote…

Many Germans perceived the parliamentary government coalition as weak and unable to alleviate the economic crisis. Widespread economic misery, fear, and perception of worse times to come, as well as anger and impatience with the apparent failure of the government to manage the crisis, offered fertile ground for the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.

Using a deadlock among the partners in the "Grand Coalition" as an excuse, Center party politician and Reich Chancellor Heinrich Bruening induced the aging Reich President, World War I Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, to dissolve the parliament in July 1930 and schedule new elections for September 1930. To dissolve the parliament, the president used Article 48 of the German constitution. This Article permitted the German government to govern without parliamentary consent and was to be applied only in cases of direct national emergency.

Bruening miscalculated the mood of the nation after six months of economic depression. The Nazis won 18.3 percent of the vote and became the second largest political party in the country.

In 1932, Hindenburg dismissed Bruening and appointed Franz von Papen, a former diplomat and Center party politician, as chancellor. Papen dissolved the Reichstag again, but the July 1932 elections brought the Nazi party 37.3 percent of the popular vote, making it the largest political party in Germany.

On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule, perhaps even a monarchy. Within two years, however, Hitler and the Nazis outmaneuvered Germany's conservative politicians to consolidate a radical Nazi dictatorship completely subordinate to Hitler's personal will.

The thing that sticks out to me in this account is the loss of faith in their political process. Would the Nazis still have risen to power if Germany had continued to function within its existing parliamentary system? Perhaps. But abandoning the one system that provided any checks and balances virtually assured this result.

We are certainly blessed that we do not currently live in a political situation as bad as Germany in the 1930s. As Christians in America, we face ever-increasing opposition to our values, assaults on our Constitutional rights, threats to undermine our Supreme Court (i.e., “packing”), erosion of voter confidence, and much more. Perhaps a day will come when all this becomes too much and our country looks nothing like it was envisioned by our founding fathers; however, I don’t think any of us want to open the door to replacing our form of government with fascism or a dictatorship.

One of the critical takeaways for me from this account is that voting was an extremely important piece of the political chain of events that resulted in the Nazi rise to power. Paradoxically, it could have also prevented or at least delayed this outcome. What happened in the voting booths mattered not just to Germany, but ultimately to much of the world.

What is the point I’m making? The next time somebody tells you that voting is meaningless and that politics has no effect, point to Terezin. Your vote might matter more to the future of our country and state than you could ever imagine. Remember, we never want to hearmusicfor thedeadin our country.

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