HOT TRUMPETS IN THE COLD WAR
LASKY, MELVIN J.
Hot Trumpets in the Cold War By MELVIN J.LASKY Editor, "Der Monat," Berlin BERLIN. IT IS SOMETHING that will always remain incredible, and it should not be forgotten: the Soviets, in the years...
...But now a new period is beginning, a period of peace...
...t * THE OTHER DAY a minor incident took place in a little town not far from here which can serve perhaps as an atmospheric symbol of what things are like...
...Who knows...
...This has been a tragic and horrible war...
...Awful things happened...
...The imperialist liars are getting desperate...
...Horrible deeds were committed on all sides...
...And he had won them all over...
...He was responsible for that "formalistic" Orfeo and for that "despicable wild American jazz...
...What does it all mean...
...Why don't they feed that stuff to asyluminmates...
...We must conquer the ruins in our hearts as well as the ruins in the streets...
...The era of Boogie-Woogie has been pronounced dead...
...It didn't, thank God, happen that Way...
...Well, the honeymoon is over...
...For a few days: deathly silence...
...The notice was an open apology for the fact that on the evening of February 1 he "had ended the movie-showing one minute earlier without having had permission from the Red Army to do so...
...Herr Goldschmidt was a Swiss who had "somehow managed to worm his way into the Musical Director's Chair...
...Not its political programs, which are badly-translated Kremlinese in the worst of strident German...
...War brutalities...
...What an absurd slander...
...It was almost incomprehensible, unbelievable...
...It was discovered that.a man named Goldschmidt had been musical director...
...Hitler and his criminals did...
...One day a public notice appeared in the local provincial newspaper of Beeskow in the Soviet zone...
...he was the owner of the town's movie house...
...Eastern Germany was converted into a fenced-in area for economic exploitation, instead of an open field for political penetration...
...What does it all add up to...
...It seems that the picture "Wiener Mtidln" (Vienna Gals) had indeed been stopped one minute before the end...
...The official Soviet Tagliche Rundschau announced this week the new line—"Gegen Boogie-Woogie— Fur klassische und fur Volksmusik...
...And when a WestBerryi newspaper printed the item, the German Communists stormed and fumed...
...A man by the name of Kleinert had inserted it...
...The next day the Berlin paper printed a photostat of the Beeskow public notice...
...Action was now being taken against this "swindler" and "slanderer...
...There it was, in black and white...
...Kleinert had confessed that his explanation of having had Red-Army permission had not been true...
...We had to fight it, and we fought it with every weapon we had...
...Then the Neues Deutschland, the official Communist daily, took up an "explanation" of the story...
...That was not the case...
...A simple speech, a simple humane tone...
...All of Germany could have been won over to a generally pro-Russian orientation—partly out of a new social idealism, partly out of an old totalitarian corruption, The key to Europe would have been ripe at any moment—timeschedule: spring of 1948, after the February coup in Prague—for a Communist seizure of power...
...For me there seems to be a lesson in politics and sociology there— you can't even go to your local movie house to see some God-awful nonsense called Vienna Gals without getting yourself all wound up, caught, and trapped in "plots," "slanders," and the darkest corners of world-politic si * * * EVEN IN THOSE RECESSES of the Communist apparatus where a bit of the old Marxian flexibility has been able to retain itself, the new era of BolBhevik Bungling is inexorably setting in...
...It could have gone that way in Berlin as well as Saxony and Thuringia, in the West as well as the East...
...But its music, which has been given the most distinguishing programming anywhere in Europe (apart from the BBC...
...No, the Russians themselves crossed "Stalin's Europe" from the agenda of European history...
...Then it u»o* true...
...It would be a grave historical mistake to believe that (a) traditional Teuton-Slav enmity, (b) Goebbels' propaganda, (c) the enraged war passions, and (d) the rape-and-looting scenes of April-May, 1945, filled the Germans with such a limitless antipathy that nothing Moscow could do or say would possibly win them over...
...The secret police went brutally to work, instead of waiting their time until all the Ministries of Police and Interior had been bored from within...
...The only music that will be broadcast will be music that "will build the pride of the Germans and help unite them...
...For many years now the pride and joy of Eastern propaganda has been Goebbels' Grossdeutscher Rundfunk, the gigantic broadcasting station which the Soviets still control (in the heart of the British sector of Berlin...
...S. Timofeyev and W. Nikolayev—and "he wasn't even a German citizen...
...Shall we let the hatreds and bitterness of the pact blind us to the hope of the future...
...With the exception of open references to "Neger-Judieche" degeneration, it was a document which might have appeared in Das Reich or the Volkische Beobachter...
...IT IS SOMETHING that will always remain incredible, and it should not be forgotten: the Soviets, in the years 1945-1950, had to commit every error, stupidity, blunder in the book in order to lose the political battle for Germany...
...We didn't start it...
...Now only music of "the Realistic school" will be played...
...Kleinert had been guilty of a "rotten provocation...
...He was the one who "forgot all about Beethoven's Symphonies and Schubert's Lieder...
...That is what they did, and that is how they lost it...
...You see what I mean...
...Life, wherever the Russians were, became a grey, poverty-stricken, fearful thing...
...He was the one who had "practically, sabotaged" Soviet musical programs...
...From a brilliant and costly performance of Monteverdi's Orfeo to the latest American jazz and swing—Radio Berlin was the spot on the dial you had to turn to...
...He obviously "hadn't the slightest notion of German culture"—wrote Messrs...
...He had since been removed...
...I myself heard an intelligent and sympathetic Soviet officer in the summer of 1945, say to a group of anti-Nazi Germans (whose belongings, and wives, had not had better treatment than all the rest): "Look here...
...Also: Shostakovich, Gliere, Prokofiev, Khatchaturian, Kabalevsky, Novikov, Soloviov-Sedoi, Blanter, and Dunayevsky...
...now we can all work together and build a new society...
Vol. 33 • April 1950 • No. 15
