Germany's Klezmer Craze
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
LETTER FROM FLENSBURG Germany's Klezmer Craze By Ruth Ellen Gruber Flensburg I don't remember ever hearing of the north German town of Flensburg until shortly before my recent trip there....
...Front man Michael Alpert, sporting a dark pink shirt that perfectly matched the painted draperies in the picture, joshed with the crowd in Yiddish...
...They're slower...
...One, emblazoned with the message, "Greetings from Flensburg...
...Brave Old World's CD notes have pointed out that Germany is one of the few countries where one can make a living playing Jewish music...
...The world doesn't open until you have passed that tunnel...
...featured a photo taken from space of the earth, hanging in blackness, with a big arrow zooming in on Flensburg's position...
...The trip was research for a book I'm writing on non-Jewish European interest in Jewish culture...
...I remember the sun coming up, a huge red ball in a clear summer sky...
...He had swarthy skin, a long, pointed nose, lascivious lips, a rapacious expression, a straggly beard and what looked like earlocks...
...For us as a group, playing the music is a little bit thinking of the people who died because of our fathers—it allows the music to live again, prevents these wonderful songs from being lost...
...I threaded through crowds of shoppers, past fast food stalls overflowing with sautéed mushrooms, Thai noodles, fried potatoes, egg rolls, pizza, beer, and sausages of all descriptions...
...An introduction thanked me for my interest in the Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt and informed me that the facility is the biggest employer in northern Schleswig-Holstein...
...Farmers form them by piling up stones at the edges of their holdings and covering them with earth, he explained...
...A lot of names began with those letters, so I saw all sorts of things, like people who got fined for trying to direct traffic when they were drunk...
...I asked her whether she felt it strange to hear this kind of music—I meant Jewish music—performed in a church...
...Ruth Ellen Gruber, a new contributor to the NL, is a writer based in Italy...
...Trees and bushes then grow, serving as natural wind-breaks, living fences called "knicke," from the onomatopoetic word meaning to crack or break...
...I first traveled in this region when I was a child...
...It was a caricature of an old man in a Santa Claus suit...
...This is a tragedy for us...
...His shoulders were hunched up and he was greedily rubbing his hands...
...The twentysomething woman sitting next to me in Flensburg, who had bobbed and jived throughout the concert, certainly had nothing weighty on her mind...
...This concert now was a follow-up, sponsored by local church organizations as well as by the city itself and a local society for "testimony and service among Jews and Christians...
...Oh, it's a very famous place," he said...
...Personally, I like the meeting of melancholy and very gay music—most people feel it in their hearts," a woman of about 50 who plays in an amateur klezmer group in Berlin toldme...
...So I think the clocks work differently there...
...It was 14 years after the end of World War II, but the scars were obvious...
...local groups put out their own CDs, and there is even a German klezmer site on the World Wide Web...
...For years its schematic form would define the world's vision of matter—in the collective imagination, atoms looked like an agglomeration of spheres rigidly connected by tubing...
...Above, an enormous 15th-century crucifix hung suspended from the whitewashed, Gothic vaulted ceiling...
...Flensburg is 80 miles almost due north of Hamburg, at the narrow tip of a fjord opening eastward into the Baltic Sea near the top end of Schleswig-Holstein, just below the Danish border...
...My brothers and I sprawled in the back, trying to sleep...
...So now I knew...
...The four Americans played electronically amplified Yiddish music in front of a massive 16th-century altar whose carved and gilded woodwork framed a painting of the Last Supper...
...About 300 people of all ages filled rows of chairs set up in the nave...
...In his introduction to the concert, a man from the church youth organization stressed die unifying significance of music, which "helps us discover the soul of others...
...The Brave Old World concert took place in the St...
...He told me about Flensburg's glory days as a great rum trading center and pointed out the raised boundaries of the flat local fields...
...I traveled from Berlin with Brave Old World's soundman, Florian, abig, bearded man who, it turned out, came from Flensburg...
...As we crossed into Schleswig-Holstein after changing trains in Hamburg, he grew more expansive...
...He had even worked at the traffic police center—back in the late 1960s, before the facility was computerized...
...Above the Santa hat was a halo...
...American and other klezmer groups have toured regularly since the 1980s, and there are dozens of homegrown German klezmer bands now, most made up of non-Jewish musicians...
...Paul's were still swaths of rubble, and in France we had encountered building after building pockmarked by bullet holes...
...To Florian, it was a symbolic as well as a physical boundary...
...It is sort of funny to hear a concert like this in a church," she agreed...
...Now he lives in Berlin, which he rather detests...
...Sometimes I'm even a bit melancholy when I remember that the Germans did away with the culture of the Jews and destroyed the Jewish people...
...Florian moved away from Flensburg nearly 30 years ago...
...Midway between Hamburg and Flensburg we crossed a high iron railroad bridge over the man-made Kiel Canal, which cuts through the peninsula from the Baltic to the North Sea...
...Looking at the map, I thought Flensburg would be an appropriately out-of-the-way place to hear East European Jewish music...
...From Brussels, our nice Jewish family of five piled into our new Hillman station wagon and set off for Denmark...
...It's home to the main computer of the German traffic police, the one that keeps track of everyone's traffic violations and how many points you have to go before your license is taken away...
...One American klezmer friend speaks of his German gigs as "gelt for guilt...
...Stopping in Brussels to tour the site of the 1958 World's Fair, we gawked at the "Atomium," the Fair's symbol, a massive and at that time ultra-contemporary tribute to the Atomic Age...
...Now, decades later, I was going to Flensburg for a klezmer music concert, one of the stops on a German tour by the American klezmer group Brave Old World...
...On the same rack I found another card, which I also bought but didn't send...
...We left Brussels in the morning and just kept going—all day and, eventually, through the night...
...Her viewpoint is quite common, but many other Germans, particularly younger people, say they simply like the music...
...My father did not want to stop in Germany...
...I think this is how borders have to go everywhere...
...The interest has spawned klezmer workshops, klezmer festivals and klezmer societies...
...At the local tourist office on a side street near the fjord, I picked up a leaflet about the police traffic headquarters...
...At a stationer's I bought some lastminute postcards...
...Reaching Denmark at dawn, we stopped at the border post, showed our passports, and crossed out of Germany...
...It was 1959 and my father, an anthropologist, was on sabbatical in England...
...When I was a kid," he said, "I would look over the Flensburger fjord to the Danish side, and I would think how exotic it must be there in Denmark, how different—like people in Berlin must have felt about the other side of the Wall...
...Nowadays, they usually don't even check your passport at that crossing...
...Back in London, great areas around St...
...Many Germans, particularly of older generations, seem attracted to Yiddish music as a conscious means of Remembering, with a capital R: It's part of the manifold process known euphemistically as "working through the past...
...Brave Old World had played in Flensburg in 1994, as part of a month-long "Anne Frank weeks" program promoting multicultural brotherhood...
...But when I called a friend in Budapest and told him where I was going, he reacted immediately...
...My father pulled the car over, got out, stretched his arms wide with the rising sun in front of him, then got back inside and went to sleep...
...Our family took a trip, our first on the Continent, to visit a Danish colleague of his...
...Its working title is Klezmer in the Wilderness...
...Whenever you go away from Schleswig-Holstein you have to pass through the tunnel under the River Elbe, or go over a bridge," he said...
...Marien Church, a towered landmark whose foundations were laid in 1284, the year Flensburg was granted a city charter by Duke Waldemar IV of Schleswig...
...My job was in the S's and T's," Florian told me, as we sipped huge 5-mark paper cups of coffee in our comfortable intercity train coach...
...You feel that you can't really get up and dance...' The morning after the concert I took a quick walk down Flensburg's pedestrian main street, lined by elegant 18th-century facades...
...Klezmer music is popular in Germany...
...And then I got my first passport, and we crossed the border—and found that everything was almost the same...
Vol. 80 • April 1997 • No. 6
