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.