Tell Me About… Biographies behind the Projects

Kurt Weill

If Kurt Weill lived in the present day, what music might he be into? According to the artists of the musical theater piece “over and over/vorbei nicht vorbei” at the Komische Oper Berlin, it would be Hip Hop. “This aesthetic of recombining different elements has many similarities with his own.” The piece is not only a musical homage to Weill (1900–1950), the composer who was born into a Jewish family in Dessau and who is best known for “The Threepenny Opera.” The piece “over and over/ vorbei nicht vorbei” processes and deconstructs songs motivated by ideology from the times in which Weill lived and composed: the seizure of power and mass crimes committed by the National Socialists in Europe on the one hand and the confrontation with slavery and racism in America in the 1940s on the other. 

The National Socialists defamed Kurt Weill: “The name of this composer is inseparably linked with the worst degradation of our art,” was his entry in the “Lexikon der Juden in der Musik” [Encyclopaedia of Jews in Music] in 1941. To escape professional bans and persecution, Kurt Weill moved first to France in 1933 and then to America in 1935. He did not see himself as a classical expatriate: “Before Hitler and the National Socialists even thought about replacing me, I came up with the idea of re-placing myself.”

In the project “over and over/vorbei nicht vorbei: a participatory music theater project on the musical heritage of the Jewish composer Kurt Weill.”, singers, chamber orchestra and youth choir embark on a journey across German and American collective memory. A project by Komische Oper Berlin in cooperation with Arolsen Archives.

Read more: In the interview Hip-Hop meets Kurt Weill, Ted Hearne (musical director) and Daniel Fish (director) talk about their experiences with cultures of remembrance, why song lyrics have to be freed from the music in order to get a closer look and what role looking back can play for a “never again is now”.

Rosa Rosenstein

“In 1938, immediately after the ‘Reichspogromnacht,’ my father was arrested and deported to Poland. They let him take 10 Reichmarks and a small briefcase with him.” This is what Rosa Rosenstein, then 94 years old, told Centropa in 2002. Between 2000 and 2010, the association interviewed more than 1,200 Jewish Holocaust survivors in 15 countries in Central and Eastern Europe with the aim of preserving their life stories in an interview archive. Several of the biographies of Jewish people form the basis of the “MemoryLanes” project, where young people trace their stories and use them to create artistic interventions.

Rosa Rosenstein’s story began in Eastern Europe; her grandparents and parents were born in Galicia, a historical region of Southern Poland and Western Ukraine. She herself was born in Berlin in 1907. After the horrific experience of her father’s deportation from Germany in 1938 – Rosa was 30 years old at the time, the mother of two young daughters and part of the Jewish community – she and her husband decided to flee to Budapest. However, the rest of the family decided to flee to the British Mandate for Palestine. Once Jews were no longer safe in Hungary either, the Rosensteins chose to send their daughters to join the family in Palestine. While Rosa succeeded in hiding, her husband Michael died as a result of forced labor in the Soviet Union. Rosa moved to Vienna with her second husband after the war and died there in 2005. She never saw her Berlin home again: “Later, I was in East Berlin with my granddaughter. I didn’t go back to where we lived, I just couldn’t.”

In the “MemoryLanes: Paths of Remembrance to Jewish Life” project, young people are conducting research into the stories of Jewish people in Germany, Poland, and Serbia. Under the guidance of artists, the young people are exploring the Jewish history of the 20th century in Europe across borders. A project from Centropa.

Read more about the project

 

André Charon

In most cases, associations representing survivors of labor and extermination camps or prisons were already players for dealing with the past and remembrance right after the end of the war. Their members had experienced the atrocities of the National Socialists on their own bodies and committed themselves to preserving the crime scenes as memorial sites, campaigning for individual compensation payments and the recognition of victim groups, networking and helping each other. André Charon, co-founder of the Belgian survivors’ association of political prisoners in Wolfenbüttel, was one of them. He was born in Liège and was a medical student active in the Belgian resistance – until the Gestapo arrested him in 1942. Under interrogation, he was abused and severely injured in the eye. A military court sentenced him to three years imprisonment for being a member of a blacklisted organization and for spreading leaflets. After liberation by the Allies, André Charon initially stayed in Wolfenbüttel voluntarily to care for the seriously ill. When he returned to Belgium, he worked as a medical expert for war victims and co-founded the survivors’ association in 1948. The symbol of the association is a guillotine – between October 1937 and March 1945, 526 people were sentenced to death by the National Socialist judiciary and executed by guillotine or hanging in Wolfenbüttel Prison.

André Charon’s son, with the same name, is also dedicated to preserving the memory of the victims imprisoned and executed there. He entrusted the Wolfenbüttel Prison Memorial with his father’s collection, which includes a backpack he had brought home from prison: “And this backpack, which doesn’t seem particularly spacious, was of course huge for me as a small boy who wasn’t particularly tall either. However, it was even bigger than its contents or its material size. The whole weight of it was huge, not just the emotional weight but, I would call it, the civilizational weight.”

The project “Eternal prisoners?! Compensation for convicts during the Nazi period and its individual and social consequences” at the Wolfenbüttel Prison Memorial centers on a persecuted group that has received little attention to date: those sentenced to prison and executed by the National Socialists.

Read more about the project

Author: Katrin Kowark, EVZ Foundation