The German Genius

past dogged him (he had been a party member since 1935), his favored status emphasized by the fact that when he had married his second wife, in 1942, and she turned out to be one-quarter Jewish, the NSDAP had made her one of Germany’s five “honorary Aryans.” Several musicians, such as Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman, refused to play with Karajan because of his Nazi past, and in 1946 he was banned from conducting by the Soviet occupation authorities.
    Did the pressure begin to get to him? He sought psychoanalytic help from Carl Jung but in 1948 Karajan helped build the newly formed Philharmonia Orchestra in London and in 1955 he was appointed musical director for life of the Berlin Philharmonic, in succession to Furtwängler, two years later becoming artistic director of the Vienna State Opera. 59 He was also intimately involved with the Salzburg Festival, and over the next three decades, as “the genius of the economic miracle,” discovered several artists (Anne-Sophie Mutter, Seiji Ozawa) and became the top-selling classical music recording artist of all time, with some 200 million records sold.
    Given that the Nazis had been so opposed to the work—as well as the person—of Schoenberg and his pupil Anton von Webern, it was all but inevitable that their technique should become almost a new orthodoxy in the 1950s, boosted by the annual summer course in composition that was begun at Darmstadt. Three brilliant young composers, Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–70), Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926), and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), each of whom had studied at Darmstadt, emerged in the 1950s. The critic Erik Levi, best known for his book on music in the Third Reich, has described Zimmermann’s opera Die Soldaten as “the most significant German opera since Berg’s Lulu .” 60
    Henze was a fervent Schoenberg enthusiast who nonetheless removed himself to Italy to keep himself open to other musical innovations. Two of his operas, Elegie für junge Liebende ( Elegy for Young Lovers ; 1961), and Die Bassariden ( The Bassarids ; 1966), with a libretto by the English/American poet W. H. Auden (and premiered by Karajan), were immediately recognized as successful marriages of music and drama. Later, Henze became involved with the student revolutionary movement of the late 1960s, and his compositions acquired a more strident edge, looking across the world to the music of Castro’s Cuba and back to Kurt Weill. 61
    Stockhausen, the third of the postwar young Turks, was the most radical. He famously pioneered electronic music, experimented with indeterminacy (or chance), as devised by the American composer John Cage, becoming a cult figure in the 1970s, not least among certain rock musicians. 62 Stockhausen’s influence declined in the 1980s, his prominence not helped by the fact that, after 1977, he concentrated on a Wagnerian-like cycle of seven sacred operas, each one representing a day in the week. Known collectively as Licht (Light), and lasting for twenty-nine hours, it had not been staged in its entirety at the time of Stockhausen’s death in 2007. One of the logistical difficulties is that, at one point, a chamber orchestra is directed to play from above the opera house in helicopters.
    Music students still flock to Germany today to study and play.
    O VERCOMING THE P AST IN P AINTING
     
    The art form that has adjusted best to Germany’s Nazi past is painting and sculpture. The first figure to consider is Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913–51), better known as Wols. Born in Berlin, he studied the violin but preferred instead the Bauhaus under Moholy-Nagy; he moved to Barcelona in 1933 (where he refused to be called up) and then to Paris where he made a living as a photographer until he was interned in 1939 and began to paint. He suffered in great poverty during the war but was befriended and supported by Jean-Paul Sartre, though this couldn’t prevent him from drinking himself to an early grave at the age of thirty-eight. Wols’s pictures, formally called Tachiste, show openly the scars of his own life and his nation around him—they are, as one critic said, “eruptions of blood-red and black,” reminiscent in form of carcasses, suppurating wounds, and the insect life that feeds on those wounds. There is no redemption in Wols’s work. 63
    The main general phenomenon immediately after the war was the revival of abstraction. This was marked by the rehabilitation of artists like Klee and Kandinsky but it