“Every time history repeats itself, the price
goes up.”
In 1932, Carl Orff
was 37 years old and had worked some eight years now in the
Guntherschule, a radical experimental school investigating a new way of
learning, feeling and creating music and dance. The students were all young
women in their late teens exploring the new concepts of dance unleashed by
people like Isadore Duncan, Mary Wigman, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Orff was
hired as the music teacher training the dancers to create their own
accompanying music using their own bodies and voices, small percussion
instruments and later xylophones.
During this time, Orff became friends with Eberhard
Preussner who was the Director of the Music Department of the Central institute
for Education and Training in Berlin. (Preussner appeared again some 30 years
later as an important person in the Schulwerk when he much later became the
head of the Mozarteum and invited Orff to create the Orff Institut as a
department within the Mozarteum in 1961.)
Preussner introduced Orff to one of his important colleagues, Leo Kestenberg,
who in turn invited Orff to begin introducing the Schulwerk into Berlin
schools. This was the first time the work was turned towards children and Orff
was feverishly excited about the possibilities.
Consider the place. Preussner describe Berlin in 1932 as “a
place that had something to offer that could be described as an attempt to
build a new society, a city whose intellectual life was shaped by Einstein,
Planck, Spengler and where Schoenberg, Hindemith, Busoni worked, indeed, a
metropolis of minds and music. Certainly those ten or twelve years were full of
tensions that were not, however, pushed to one side, but were experienced,
suffered and used. One was full of hope and of apprehension…”
Consider the time. 1932. Just one short year later, Hitler
was elected chancellor and within three short months, everything that leaned
toward social justice, religious freedom, intellectual activity, diverse
thinking was slammed shut and 12 years of nightmare ensued. As a Jew,
Kestenberg was forced to flee, first to Prague and then Paris and later Israel.
All his notable reforms in music education in his former role were overturned
and Orff’s possibility to introduce his humanistic ideas in Berlin were closed.
Note the parallels with today. Hope and apprehension mixed,
a society vibrant with diverse people, diverse thinking, intellectual rigor and
imaginative vision shut down in three short months. If you were a Jew or a
Jehovah’s Witness or gay or Sinti/Roma gypsy or disabled or a political
dissident or a socially misfit person who listened to jazz, you were already
being herded into “starter” concentration camps and later part of the genocide
of some 6 million Jews and some 5 million “others.”
Now compare this to Trump’s attempts in the first six months
of his office: The Muslim Ban, hope to overturn gay marriage, defund schools
and arts program, deny science and intellectual thought, mock the disabled,
keep transgender people out of the military, fire anyone who asks too many
questions. It all adds up to the same idea of killing diverse thought and
diverse living and diverse worship and reducing it to the narrow bandwidth of
rich, straight, white males. He pushes aside the Montenegro President and
stands with his jaw out like Mussolini, talks to the French president’s wife
about her body, tells the Boy Scouts that Obama was a disaster.
But there are three significant differences:
1)
Hitler had an ideology of the Master Race that
captured the imagination of a beaten-down people, allowed them to commit
atrocities in the name of a beautiful imagined future. Trump’s idea of a Master
Race is he, himself and him. Yes, he hits on the same human flaws that Hitler
did, fooling poor whites into thinking that they’re part of the good ole boys
club, but not with the same ability to articulate and ultimately fool them.
2)
Our 250-year history of free speech, flawed as
the free part may be, makes it much more difficult for him to shut down
dissent. The fact that I can give this talk without fear of storm troopers,
post things about Trump’s idiocy on Facebook, teach children in my school about
social justice, put a RESIST bumper sticker on my car and freely watch Stephen
Colbert, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, Rachel Maddow, Samantha Bee and more on more
or less mainstream TV is a sign of hope that we can educate people who might
eventually vote more intelligently. And that is why it’s more important than
ever to keep speaking up and speaking out while we have that privilege. It
could change. While we can speak, this is not a time to keep silent.
3)
The one thing the German citizens didn’t have as
they went along with the lemming-like rush to disaster is the story of
something like Nazi Germany to guide them. For this willing to look into it, we
know where this can lead and thus, have the possibility of choosing not to
repeat history.
There was much criticism of Orff in the 1990’s for not
speaking out more strongly or fleeing and much conjecture about how much he
collaborated with the Party. That’s the
subject for another talk. In his favor, we can say with authority that even
when Gunther required all her teachers to join the Nazi Party, Orff did not. I
see him as a musician who hoped to stay to the side of politics and did what he
could to survive. Which mostly meant trying to stay under the radar and out of
the way even as Carmina Burana had its premier performance in 1937.
What I’d like to accent here is his profound understanding
of the role of art in human culture and creativity within art and the special
promise of young children. In my experience, the Orff idea and ideal of music
for all realized in an inclusive musical community that welcomes diverse
expression is the exact antithesis of everything Hitler stood for and Trump
stands for. When done with integrity and intelligence, it offers precisely the
healing our broken world needs. Most of the teachers I meet who come to the
Orff trainings come to further elevate both their integrity and intelligence in
thinking about how to teach humanistically through this vibrant pedagogy. For
it’s only by creating a new generation of children who feel comfortable with
ambiguity, who feel welcomed and celebrated, who have the means to find their
power through artistic and spiritual expression that we have any hope of
surviving—and indeed, thriving—in the future.
