Mendelssohn & the Nazis

In my morning egg-and-NPR routine a few weeks ago, I heard the story of Felix Mendelssohn, the German Romantic composer maligned in his lifetime and in the century following his death in 1847. Richard Wagner condemned the composer in a famous 1850 essay because Mendelssohn was a Jew, and drew on long-standing anti-semitic stereotypes to denigrate his rival artist. Anti-semitism threatened to marginalize and destroy the composer for the next hundred years; Nazi leadership banned performance and publication of his works. But members of the underground resistance smuggled Mendelsohn's compositions out of the country, and they survived the Nazi threat.

The image of men and women tucking papers into suitcases on trains from Berlin to Krakow, perhaps risking their lives for music, haunts me. The NPR reporter expressed our collective gratitude for these subversive, life-affirming rescues in the face of genocidal fascism.

But would I choose to rescue art in a situation of conflict? Our attempts at peace and ending suffering focus on the bare bones- food, water, hospitals, ending the shooting, trying to get a viable government in place- and we're not so good at that stuff yet. At least theoretically, we triage the lives, the programs, the pieces of governance that we think are most essential. We place human lives (at least in bulk) above all else, so the idea of saving music can sound idealistic, or even cruel, if energy expended on it could be placed in hospitals or aid delivery.

So if I was in Nazi Germany, I might not think about saving the scores of Felix Mendelsohn. Then again, those who did were probably not graduate students, trying to compose a theoretical peace, or UN workers, outsiders formulating strategies for effective aid. They were probably people who felt powerless to stop the war or the Holocaust, but who had possession of art that mattered to them, and a plan for preserving it. It was the resistance within their reach.

And there is paradox in ignoring art while placing human life at a premium. Art- by which I mean both that celebrated in famous museums and the songs and paintings of children- in a general sense makes our lives rich, and in specific cases represents cultures, traditions, and ethnicities endangered by war. Given that the Nazi attempt to control art in Germany was so systematic and ideological, should preserving culture and the arts also rank high in our peace-making endeavors?

Felix Mendelssohn commands more respect than ever before. But the project to fully uncover his works did not begin until 1996, a full 50 years after the fall of Nazism.

the theology of collateral damage

I've been wanting to start blogging more, now that certain classmates (who will soon be spread through the corners of the earth!) have picked it up, too. I've also been inspired by the fledgling presidency of Barack Obama, hopeful that I'll have a bit of a voice in the administration that's closing Guantanamo, appointing special peace envoys to the Middle East and Afghanistan, planning direct diplomatic talks with Iran, and that made the promise not to "sacrifice our ideals for our security." I feel like I've started down the long path towards international law junkie-dom, a habit that I hope will fare better under Obama than Bush. And I'd really like to write up some questions and key points from the Darfur conference that I went to at Yale on Friday.

But, while I really intended this blog to be mostly political, faith and theology have been on my mind a lot lately. So here you have it- a blog entry about war and theology.

In my personal faith journey- I come from the Christian tradition- I have often asked if the picture my religion paints of the world bears resemblance to what I see around me. Much is unknowable, of course, which I suppose is why I still have faith, but I have discarded and questioned many elements of the Christianity of my culture in my own thinking.

The prosperity gospel, for instance. The idea that God will bless us if we love God, that things work out ok, here on earth, for God's children who are faithful.

I come from an environment that is politically stable and economically prosperous enough that one might honestly consider these notions tenable. From this position of privilege, however, I've chosen (out of guilt and moral duty? out of a sense of adventure? out of the sense of purpose derived from struggle?) to engage in the questions of war. Though safe and sound myself, I see that slaughter, rape, indifference, selfishness, and the thirst for power are not the exceptions in human history but the rule. When considering human experience, genocide does not stand darkly in the periphery of the world, but squarely in the center. The difficulties of refugees are not tragic because they are so rare; they are tragic- in part- because they are so common.

So I'm only interested in theology that can withstand the scrutiny of a child soldier. I'm only interested in theology that still seems relevant at the end of a gun. I'm only interested in a theology that wrestles with the question of evil not just intellectually but existentially, and on a daily basis. My theology, if it is sound, will not prop up ethnic and religious divisions and violence, or justify imperialism. It will not be placated by empty rhetoric, it will not enslave, and it will not be dismissive of collateral damage.

If God is really a God of love, in other words, God sits right down in the middle of that collateral damage, with all the people wounded by war, and cries and suffers with them, and cries for justice with them.

And it turns out that I've found this God in Christianity. Sure, it can be hard to see that God amidst the triumphalism, the self-satisfaction, the rules and regulations, the ethnocentrism, the bureaucracy, and the assurances about God's plans that we Christians often place at the center of our religion. But our scriptures show a God who suffered, and who grieves, and who constantly hands down orders about orphans and widows and poor people and beating swords into plowshares. And who tells Jews and Gentiles to get along.

This doesn't answer the question of evil in light of God's supposed almightiness, of course. Nothing probably ever will. But it is one reason I'm still a Christian, and why faith remains so interwoven in my personal thoughts and motivations about justice and peace. Questions of war- which are still, really, optional for me, but mandatory for millions- are there at the crux of my faith tradition.