Douglas Mercer
December 20 2023
They say that no less a person than Josef Mengele himself liked to whistle Wagner as he worked and why not? As necessary and vital as the work of sending Shlomo Bernstein up the chimney was the days are long and grueling and the stench is atrocious, ashes rain down all over the place and scatter on one’s clothes and getting rid of the bones is a dirty business. Getting them off the trains and into the incineration machines was a hard day’s slog and if there is anything I have learned while walking on this planet it’s that purging parasites in the fires, while noble and admirable, is no walk in the park or day at the beach. They say Eichmann himself fainted at the sight of it and that Heinrich Himmler had to cover his nose with a pure white handkerchief. Bloody business is the best business of all but even when you drown some kittens from time to time some holdover of the hangover of the vestiges of your “humanity” produces a heart pang. Your heart might not fall directly or all the way into your boots but a soft sentiment descends when you see them struggle as they go under. At the beginning of the war Himmler said it was a quandary that they lived in a Christian country and eight or even twenty years of teaching could not easily overcome that. They did not call it the Thousand Year Reich for nothing, and they knew it would take at least a few generations to purge the nation of poets and thinkers of its pity---but if victory came they had all the time in the world for it would be their world and eventually a cleansed Germany would be rid of all scruples, squeamishness, and moral obstacles. That is why the Reichsfurher of the Protection Squad gave the exhortation to his soldiers to banish the sentimental and to be rid of all feeling and keep their eyes on the new eternity they were creating. As for the people in the camps they were the soldiers of soldiers doing the stalwart and yeoman’s work of ridding the world of its blood sucking leeches now and forever. Which is why amidst the fallout from the blazing fires and the ear-splitting screams and in the face of the scratches made on the walls as they experienced a dying fall one from time to time wanted a few arias from the Ring Cycle to brighten one’s day and remind one of what it was all about and what it was all for: the far future. And surely one can have compassion for those grizzled veterans and the old fighters who were doing the signal work of the ages and setting German blood free once and for all. To hear the Jews tell it humming Wagner about such a task shows one to be of ice-cold blood and to have frozen water running through one’s veins and to be bereft of normal emotions. But it occurs to me that whistling Wagner never killed anyone and is most definitely good for the soul. They say too that the quintessential conundrum posed by the National Socialists is how a nation which produced Beethoven and Goethe could also have produced the “horrors” or Auschwitz-Birkenau. If you think about it though you realize that the ones from whom those immortal giants sprang are the only people who could.
“Seven years ago, composer Leo Geyer was rifling through the Auschwitz archives, looking for ways to create a musical score in memory of Martin Gilbert, the British historian and Holocaust expert who had died in February that year. Geyer, 31, then made an astonishing discovery. He stumbled across fragments of music played by orchestras at the camp that had remained untouched for nearly 80 years.”
What a find, eh? Shuffling through some meaningless and musty files and you pluck from out of nowhere the Jewish equivalent of the Holy Grail. To them those notes on the pages are not amateurish efforts at composition by nutrition deprived forty-five-pound skeletons, they are the last of the long-lost lore of the Hebrew people and, as such, must be preserved with as much meticulous care and love as they can muster. Don’t be surprised if they house them as sacred relics in underground caverns in temperature-controlled rooms set just so in order that the ravages of time and the elements can be kept at bay for a long as possible. So valuable are they that no traveling show of them can be dared; to lose even a piece of these tattered if meaningless pages would be tantamount to another Shoah in itself. Not only must they never forget they must shepherd this music into the future unimpaired. And Jewish school children will be trooped right past them and told with a straight face that on those documents is the music of their people in a time of historical distress and so must be rated among the sanctified artifacts of the Jewish Race. Because by rights they should have been burned to a crisp right there on the spot with great grandmother Sarah but just as by the grace of Yahweh she managed to scrape her way on her belly into the United States Of America so to too these precious heirloom papers miraculously are extant like some kind of Ishmael survived alone to tell them.
“On Monday (November 27 2023), part of The Orchestras of Auschwitz, an opera ballet created by Geyer using those fragments and survivors’ accounts of the death camp, was performed by an orchestra at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London. Speaking about one fragment titled Futile Regrets, Geyer said: The handwriting is identical to mine. It sent goosebumps down my spine and I felt it was my duty to finish it. In this harrowing and heart-wrenching composition, the composer is trying to express what they are feeling and it is deeply sorrowful. Because of the nature of the sketch and its emotional weight, it seems unlikely that this ever would have been performed.”
How bad could the place have been if they were composing scores? And not just any old scores but scores that touched the heart in the most profound and moving ways (they claim), scores so touching and soul searing resonant that it sends shockwaves up and down the spine and makes the skin tingle and crawl with soul twisting awe. The toff composer who put this together speaks of the traumatic experience of listening to it and once he managed regain his composure and cool after experiencing this ocean of grief he was compelled to see that it was performed so other morons could partake in the standard issue lachrymose lies that the Jews peddle like cyanide laced candy. In fact however a quick listen to this supposed powder keg of feeling and deep emotion reveals it to be banal and maudlin, full of the treacle that is the Jewish stock in trade in these matters. It is not so much weighty as fraught with sickly and hackneyed strains that could move only the spiritually immature or those prepped by the Jewish press to be so moved. On an artistic plane they were not so much composing as decomposing, much like the innumerable bodies of the Jewish victims who supposedly died by close range bullet wounds to the back of the head in many a forest and field in the Europe under control of the National Socialists. The music has all the hallmarks of its Jewish provenance, both middling and melodramatic, the kind of thing that when you listen to it you’d have to have a heart of stone not to burst out laughing. None of this of course did anything to stop the music from getting a big send off in London, and fawning coverage in the world Jewish press.
“The equivalent is hundreds of pieces of broken ceramic. Trying to put them together again to make vases is extraordinarily difficult because you don’t know what bits go with what and, in many cases, pieces are entirely missing. This has required years of cross-referencing with people’s testimonies to understand what instruments were available at what time, who was playing when and to start to piece together the music of Auschwitz. There were orchestras in numerous concentration camps during the Holocaust. Some Nazis realized the advantages of playing marching music to forced laborers, while other officers wanted to be entertained. Some musicians were spared death if they could play in an orchestra. The arrangement of the pieces reflected the instruments available at the time, resulting in what Geyer described as an extremely strange-looking orchestra. The absence of certain instruments created a peculiar, twisted and somewhat sinister sound, he said.”
Ah, the painstaking research done by this sniveling man; he was in a wasteland of shards and managed what they could somehow never do to Humpty Dumpty: put it back together again. It was a miracle of reconstruction so much so that you’d have to be a grim one indeed not to see Yahweh’s loving hand in the process. He went through the books and criss-crossed and checked and re-checked the notes to see which went with which and what with what, he listened to the mostly made-up stories and pieced the patchwork together and made the music of out of the tattered shreds and ragged patches. This is what passes for deep and lauded research today, some fool goes down into the files of the camps and comes up with a whole lot of nothing and presents it to the world and from the response you’d think he found a new and unknown Beethoven Sonata. And that twisted and sinister sound you hear has nothing to do with the lack of instruments, it has everything to do with the wicked Jewish spirit which when it forays into categories of art created by the White race inevitably produces a skewed version of it which mocks and travesties the real thing. They would have been better off just sticking with the straight marches and not playing the secret and bitter music or inserting the vain cryptograms. After all if you are heading straight into the fire it’s good to keep in step and not lag or fall behind for it occurs to me it never killed anyone to keep one’s head down as you are on the way to the end.
“Through their music, Geyer has come to know the composers of the fragments intimately and cited the late conductor and Auschwitz survivor Simon Laks – one of the composers of the fragments - as one figure he feels connected to. Laks, who led the Birkenau Men’s Orchestra, faced the daunting task of composing and rehearsing complicated pieces within a day or risk execution by SS commanders. Sometimes all he had to compose music on the whim of Nazi officers. Geyer said: On countless occasions, he was writing really complicated pieces of music down from memory. He had to do extraordinary things where an SS Commander would come over and whistle a tune to him and then within a day he had to write that down, orchestrate it for multiple parts, rehearse it and then present it. If it wasn’t up to standard, then he would have been murdered. Under those conditions, he survived.”
It was a work camp, what did they expect? A day at the beach? A walk in the park? A stroll through the irises? A bed of roses? The Jews are notoriously work shy, they are a rent seeking people, who leech and parasite off the productive, and it shocks them when they are called upon to roll up their sleeves and slog out a living, to sweat blood and bullets, their preferred mode of being being clipping coins and sliding some numbers around on a ledger to double cross and double book us and devalue an honest dollar. And it’s a truth as old as time that when a member of the Master Race wants some music and toute suite too it’s best to hop to and not disappoint him. The Emperors Of Rome had their thumbs up and thumbs down on pain of death, so why should a mere Jew expect anything different? After all they could have just sent them straightaway up the smokestack but they gave them a chance to walk on the knife edge of life and death like a juggler on the thinnest of tight ropes who hopes against hope that one of those balls does not fall and cause him to lose his balance. It was Arthur Miller who gave us the archetype slogan, he was trying to resurrect a failing career path which was not anything to write home to mother about to begin with when he wrote another one of those made for Jew TV movies: Playing For Time. Playing For Time! My goodness, the pathos! Those mean old Nazis boy they loved them some arias and some sonatas and when they found that a soon to be dead Jew could play a note or two they figured they’d wring out the last bit of music from him before making him a discard on the quite literal ash heap. Play for time Jew boy! Play for time because you don’t have much of it. Play me some Bach and play me some Beethoven, it has that dying fall just as you will in short order. They say those that know they are about to die play the loveliest of lovelorn notes the same way the swan is always at its most beautiful when he’s on his way out. They say that they had that boxer too and he was boxing for time; the master race was ringside and they wanted a pugilistic and bloody performance; the winner lived to fight another day but the thing about living to fight another day is that at some point you run out of time. Unless of course you belong to the kinship of German blood—then you live forever.
“Laks survived the Holocaust and testified about his experiences in Mélodies d’Auschwitz, where he described the marching music as a supplementary torture instrument. The marching music provided a beat for prisoners as they walked to the fields and factories. Geyer said this music was upbeat, lively and jolly but he noted the unimaginable juxtaposition of slave laborers hearing the music as they returned carrying the dead. To hear this music for the first time was horrifying, he said. From the marching music to compositions by inmates, The Orchestras of Auschwitz presents a series of vignettes that function on their own and also in a sequence. This means the piece can bring together a variety of different people’s stories, different pieces of music from different orchestras, with a narrative which is completely true.”
When are you heading to that chamber with that wooden door to be gassed like a bug you most certainly do want some jaunty and upbeat music to march to do you not? No slow lugubrious dirge and most definitely no customary suits of solemn black will do in such a moment. The old joke among the National Socialist in-crowd was that the bodies went in red and emerged pink which was certainly an improvement, at which point Hans and Günter would chuckle a low chuckle or a hearty guffaw, clink glasses, and celebrate the auspicious future of a Jew free Europe. The marching music helped them keep pace and keep up, its basic and drill like cadence reminded them that they were just an inconsequential cog now in a great machine of White aggression and dominance, to be ground down and ground up to fertilize a future with an unlimited range of eternal possibilities. Contrast the march with the dirty groundswell of malign music the Jews produced and you can see why they wanted them to keep marching; had there been a revolt or a wanton display of passive resistance they would have had to shoot them on the spot on sight where they were standing and the blood and the gore, though a salutary spectacle to be sure, leaves a foul odor and some lower level desk killer will inevitably have to clean it up. Because when the Jews are trooping their way to their final and richly deserved destination in the ground you want their spindly little legs to keep time—because time is of the essence. And you want that aforementioned jaunty tune and say what you will about Aryan cruelty it would never kill any of them to whistle while they walked to their death.
“The pieces, already of varying levels of completion, had been mostly destroyed, and some had burned at the edges. It’s the equivalent of several hundred jigsaw puzzles, except many of the pieces are missing. It requires a certain amount of musical detective work to put the pieces together, to recompose missing parts, to discover the music. This week, Geyer led a chamber orchestra in the first public performance of excerpts from his project, an opera-ballet called The Orchestras of Auschwitz. The concert was part of a larger awareness and fundraising for a stage production and tour of the piece, which Geyer hopes to bring to audiences in 2025.”
So we have this to not look forward to. It will travel around the world like King Tut and insipid audiences will be moved to meaningless tears. The press will blazon and ballyhoo the sick and saccharine music and act like it matters at all. This guy was the Sherlock Holmes of throwaway Jew music and those crisped edges show how close they came to meeting their well-deserved fate. But it’s not surprising that the Germans wanted music to fill their lives, they were the musical people par excellence; before the advent of the radio killed it off every home was its own little orchestra with each family member playing an instrument and a part; come a Saturday night one home in the town would be picked to put on the performance for that week; so it’s not a surprise that at one point the National Socialists had some six budding Jew orchestras playing strange music with strange instruments or some straight up classical so soothe the savage breast ; and then of course the be all and end all of it was Mengele’s pet dwarf troop of musicians who would come in to the camp in the mockery of high society darlings and strut around like parodied impressions of the beautiful people. Let no one say that these National Socialists were grim or dour men and didn’t know how to relax, enjoy and amuse themselves. But in the end the image of images is those not deep-sixed enough bodies which began disaggregating themselves in the midday sun and forced clods of earth to shoot out like one champagne cork popping after another. And perhaps on some better plane the improbable but quite true scene of the roiling and heaving earth upsurging in splatter like so many fireworks could be set to one of those askew concentration camp scores and it would become that most absurd of things: a fanfare for dead Jews. And when that kind of absurdity becomes the historical table stakes the only thing a sane man can do is raise it with grandiloquence.
Fanfare For Dead Jews
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10963
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10963
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
