Richard Strauss\’s opera \”Salome\” had its Israelipremière in Tel Aviv this month. Strauss, who died in 1949,served, however briefly, as a cultural official in Adolf Hitler\’s Nazi administration. The season, by the visiting Kirov Opera from St.Petersburg, was an unchallenged hit. Strauss has been forgiven,perhaps because he had a Jewish daughter-in-law and soon learned thefolly of his ways.
Imagine that it is 1940, and Great Britain is fighting Hitler\’s Nazi Germany almost alone. Imagine, further, that an American who loves both America and England and hates the Nazis works in American intelligence and has access to secret files concerning Germany that, for whatever reason, the United States has not shared with Great Britain. This American gives the secrets to England and is caught.
With a week-long celebration to mark theopening of the Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna heaped honors on theseminal composer of 20th-century music, while visibly agonizing overthe sins of its Nazi past.
What a peculiar piece of work is \”Bent.\” The film version ofMartin Sherman\’s play, first presented on the London stage in 1979,and later on Broadway, has taken almost 20 years to come to thescreen. It\’s not difficult to see why. Not only is it turgid stuff,with a paucity of unfilmable ideas, but in an industry that sometimesseems to specialize in specious history, it will be hard to matchthis one for irresponsibility.
One could almost see historyon the march in Washington last week when the House Banking Committeeheld a day of hearings on Nazi plunder — stolen artworks in themorning, looted insurance policies after lunch — and how to restoreit to its rightful owners.
During World War II, did an anti-Semitic Swiss government split up Jewish refugee families, require the men to perform back breaking work in forced labor camps, and treat Jews markedly worse than Christian refugees?
The Nazis took my uncle Henry at the beginning ofthe war. He survived more than five years as a slave. Young andstrong, he was a carpenter, and they needed carpenters. At first,they moved him from camp to camp, including a stay at Pleshow, whereSchindler\’s people were kept. And, finally, Auschwitz. A slavelaborer, he built parts of the camp. When the Allies advanced, he wastaken on the infamous Death March from Poland into Germany. He wasliberated from Buchenwald by the U.S. Army in 1945.
Henry Bondi, a Princeton, N.J., biochemical engineer, has spent much of his adult life chasing after a painting that he says Nazis stole from his aunt. Now, at 76, he\’s finally getting close.
Imagine that it is 1940, and Great Britain is fighting Hitler\’s Nazi Germany almost alone. Imagine, further, that an American who loves both America and England and hates the Nazis works in American intelligence and has access to secret files concerning Germany that, for whatever reason, the United States has not shared with Great Britain. This American gives the secrets to England and is caught.
What a peculiar piece of work is \”Bent.\” The film version of Martin Sherman\’s play, first presented on the London stage in 1979,and later on Broadway, has taken almost 20 years to come to the screen. It\’s not difficult to see why. Not only is it turgid stuff,with a paucity of unfilmable ideas, but in an industry that sometimes seems to specialize in specious history, it will be hard to match this one for irresponsibility.
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