1947

A twenty-four-year-old woman wanders through the rubble of Munich. Groping her way through stones, pebbles and dust, she can barely recognize streets familiar to her from early childhood – buildings whose skeletons now hang in the air. She would traverse the remains of the synagogue she loved so much; the first to be burnt in Germany in the devastating Kristallnacht (1938). At the time, she was safely away in Mandatory Palestine. Now she comes back to bring children from displaced persons camps to Palestine, as part of a Jewish Agency delegation.

Scant memories of her grandfather, the adored Rabbi of the community, would summon in her mind; perhaps some related vocalities. What struck her most, however – she later told her mother – was what was stridently missing: the huge swastika flags hanging on monumental buildings. Her daily encounter with them, on her way to her Nazified Gymnasium, wounded her repeatedly. Alongside the song she loathed so much – a joyful, seemingly harmless ditty, intoned by the Hitler youth marching through those very streets:

The main sound reaching her ears now is the clatter of hammers and spades working day and night to build it all anew. ‘I saw Munich demolished’, she said to herself, absorbing the sights, ‘and that's how I want to remember it’ – vowing she will never come back.Footnote ⁸

This young woman is my mother, Esther. And this is the most formative story she bequeathed us, her offspring. It captures loaded pasts and changing presents, all within a powerful, however mute, emblem. She did not mind us going back to Germany, nor later to Munich. For herself, though, she wanted to keep it that way. We keep the story in turn. And I strive to hear through it silenced voices and unheard sounds.

In the same place, about that time – an old man adorns Germany's rubbled cities with rich, sonic attire. He is Richard Strauss. ‘In Memoriam!’ he inscribed them in his much-debated Metamorphosen, a couple of weeks before Germany's final fall. Bavaria's capital, his beloved city, was the most Nazified metropolis in Germany.Footnote ⁹ And he wrote his highly allegorized lament over what he called the ‘most terrible period of human history’, which now reached its end, ‘the twelve-year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany's 2,000 years of cultural evolution met its doom’.Footnote ¹⁰

I remember the first time I heard the piece. I had some vague idea of what it stood for and my reaction was aesthetic aversion. It was the very juxtaposition of the date of the composition and the nostalgic style that so offended me, not knowing at the time either its genealogy or its reception history. I felt that Strauss had rendered rubble into ruins, to allegorize, fetishize, and embellish the destruction with unfitting splendour. A conductors’ favourite – in the style of the composer's youthful Tod und Verklärung (1889) and Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht of 1899 – it erected a grandiose monument for Germany in a language fraught with yearning over a past long dead. Nothing metamorphoses in the work: fixed themes and well-crafted motifs mainly exchange places and parts; some new ones appear on stage to integrate later in the overall grandeur.Footnote ¹¹

Yearning over a lost culture replaces raging over genocide. Echoing hallowed sounds, the tone poem grieves for stones and styles, overlooking unprecedented cruelty and human humiliation. Its marche funèbre (alluding to the second movement of Beethoven's Eroica symphony) confines guilt to those ‘greatest criminals’ who, as it were, took Germany as hostage. Metamorphosen thus paved the way to similar attempts at self-exoneration in the so-called ‘Stunde Null’ (or zero hour), and thereafter.

Post-1967 (Six-Day) War Jerusalem

Another rubbled area and personal case of sonic repugnance. The small, humble but relatively calm city in which I spent the first ten years of my life has changed overnight. The old city, along the remnants of the Second Temple – the so-called ‘Wailing Wall’ – was conquered by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), together with all other Arab neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem (and the rest of the ‘West Bank’, Sinai and Golan Heights).

The high wall separating East from West (the site of Jewish Jerusalem since 1948) was destroyed, and the way to the Old City and the ‘Wailing Wall’ (the Kotel) broken through anew for Jews. For years, that road – Mamilla Street – was left in piles of rubble. The area near the Western Wall was likewise ‘razed’; almost no sign was left from the ‘Mughrabi Quarter’ that resided adjacently until 1967.Footnote ¹² Crossing from West to East meant going through rubble, stumbling upon gravel, breathing dust. It also meant meeting children like myself, but poor and strange, recent subjects of Israeli occupation, looking at me with the eyes of the enslaved. For many, the rubble meant victory, a re-appropriation of what was ‘ours’. I felt confused, disoriented. In the vast horizons that were suddenly opened up to hills, walls and worlds we could barely imagine before, a medley of voices and sounds was heard that did not make sense to me.

But there was music (estranged, always estranged from the rubble). Sounds I disliked or even detested, not quite knowing why. These were the paeans. They were kitschy and hollow.Footnote ¹³ While everyone sang them at school, in the youth movement and on the radio, whenever someone started to intone one, I felt bored and fatigued. I was supposed to be part of the general celebration. But I was not. At home, my father told me that now that we won the war, we must make peace with our neighbours. We cannot rule another people, he told me, as soon as the war was over.

Ruins were also part of my childhood, before and long after that war; pastoral and picturesque as ruins can be. We became exposed to them mostly in the course of long hikes, considered a prime Zionist activity. Climbing a hill, you could observe those ‘Khirbe’Footnote ¹⁴ near fig trees, sabra cactus, and olive groves. Such Khirbes were called ‘Kfar Aravi’ by everyone around, but no one explained to us, nor did we tried to fathom, what it actually meant: that a few decades earlier these ruins were part of a flourishing village, whose dwellers escaped or were expelled during 1948 war. They were part of the landscape, and we accepted them as such. During the hot Israeli summers, resting in their shades, no daughter-of-a-voice conveys a message about their former dwellers: whither their whereabouts, whether they escaped, were displaced, or killed. Untuned to such moans or bemoaning; unable to hear sounds which were not ours, howling jackals could not transmit sounds of those long gone.

Autumn of 1991

Decades later, I am en route to a reunified Germany: Berlin, Dresden, Munich. I encounter rubble, or its absence. Sounds were adjacent, not directly in situ, not always in sync. The spirit of Richard Strauss kept haunting me; an (un)happy coincidence?

It is two years after the fall of the Berlin wall. A similar experience to that which many had undergone in those years of transition: rather than walk through Checkpoint Charlie, under the watch of stern East German soldiers, we now amble freely, passing through Brandenburg Gate to the former East. With thousands of others, we stride across the rubble of the huge wall. The vast plain, the dust, hot dog bars, sounds of accordion and other outdoor music, one felt in a huge cinematic location, Fellini's Dolce Vita, for one. Something was hanging in the air, expecting; what?

To the Staatsoper, up Unter-den-Linden, I enter alone, for the first time in my life. Tonight they perform Strauss's Rosenkavalier, Op. 59 (1911). My grandparents loved it, back in Breslau of the 1920s, my father told me later. I sit in the first gallery, close enough to the stage, next to a nice German man in his late seventies. He was totally absorbed. He knew it all by heart. Well dressed, he seemed a West Berliner. Did he cross, like me, today, from West to East? If he did, surely that was not the first time. Decades before the division, even before the post-war Berlin rubble, he used to spend his evenings here, I guessed. Maybe before the Nazi era, even? Age-wise, this is plausible. Did he continue to enjoy Strauss's bittersweet worlds through the war? And the inevitable question: What did he actually do during those twelve years of the Third Reich? When sitting next to him, swayed by those fin de siècle sounds and the dream worlds they elicit, the matter received special poignancy.

Summer of 1994: Dresden

On our way from Wolfenbüttel to Prague. A vast, open area of rubble. This time, however, the stones are neatly ordered, within huge cages, each signed: venue, wall, row, place, prepared like splinters for the restoration of huge archaeological jars. Only that the jars here are of the Frauenkirche, the Kunstakademie, and other monumental buildings of the city's Baroque centre (the Altstadt). Walking through the area, huge posters of before the before, and after the after cry out loud to the meaning of it all. If you did not happen to know what transpired on the night of 13–14 February 1945, here is your chance.

But what exactly happened and why? I am walking with my eleven-year-old son, and my friend Barbara, raised in West Germany, and we cannot believe our eyes: no sign of the crimes and violence of the Nazi era are to be found, whether committed towards Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, other Germans, civilization. It is five years after the ‘Wende’, but Dresden is still under the spell of imputing the city's destruction to ‘Fascists’ crimes’ – that mysterious tribe that happened to conquer the city, or Germany. They apparently have no connection to those who lived there, at the time or later. The only concern, it seemed, was to rebuild; to bring the city back to its full Baroque splendour, cover up the wound that was still gaping, almost fifty years after those terrible nights.

Back in Dresden, five years later. There are no signs whatsoever. The city centre looks dazzling and regal as during its heyday, if not more. At the Semperoper (reconstructed during the Communist period and reopened 1985) tonight they are performing Strauss's Elektra, Op. 58 (1903), under the baton of Italian maestro Giuseppe Sinopoli (1946–2001). Elektra's unremitting call for absolute revenge, her imagined dance (later hypostatized) when the bloody massacre would be over, not only terrifies her fellow protagonists but also electrifies audiences far and near. Does anyone listen to what Elektra tries to convey? Her gory refusal to come to terms with an unjust present – is that too intimidating for the glamorous audience that gathered here tonight? A willing suspension of disbelief should work back and force, from Elektra's plight to a recent history. Instinctively, it is avoided. And yet it comes back, from the back door, again and again, demanding its presence, its toll; for how long? And would anyone listen?

Munich, Summer 2003

We are here for an interfaith wedding, at the sumptuous Schloss Nymphenburg. My mother remembered it from the infamous ‘Nacht der Amazonen’ – a propagandistic, promiscuous open-air revue held by the Nazis between 1936 and 1939. Those sights and sounds have long disappeared. The wedding is a high-class event, and among the honorary guests is the daughter of Claus von Stauffenberg.Footnote ¹⁵ No signs of the damage caused by bombs are discerned in this huge, magnificent baroque palace. Beautiful Christian and Jewish sounds, as well as chamber music, flow through the summer morning of that happy occasion.

In the city, I follow the footsteps of the family: theirs and the larger family residences (mostly destroyed), the beloved Englischer Garten, my mother's Nazified Gymnasium. The ground where the synagogue stood is now a huge parking lot; a small plaque reminds those who search for it, in Hebrew and German: ‘Here stood the synagogue “Ohel Jakob” that on November 9, 1938 was destroyed by the hands of the Nazis.’ The beer gardens around are full of cheerful, sans souci bourgeois. No ‘memory of the destruction’ (‘zekher la-ḥurban’, as it is called in the Jewish tradition), discloses its past.Footnote ¹⁶ On Monday afternoon, Elektra's cries are heard once again, now from the fully reconstructed Bayerische Staatsoper.Footnote ¹⁷ You can interpret it as you like, but if you are perturbed, her screams exacerbate your unrest.

Later that week, on a nice afternoon with my friends Brenda and Reinhard Strohm, we cross to the other bank of the Isar: towards the Prinzregententheater where they perform Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. Work, performance, audience, breathe youthfulness and freshness. Reinhard, a renowned opera scholar, grew up in Munich; my mother's rubble was his playground. Orfeo, like a Job twice badly struck, seeks the consolation of Echo, but to no avail. The echoes he emits are too short and flimsy, complains Orfeo.Footnote ¹⁸ Enter Apollo, his own god/father, elevating him away from his life's ruins and the Thracian women's horror (those who tore his ancient namesake to pieces) to vocally unite with him in celestial bliss. My following visits to my mother's birthplace will be more reconciled.

Winter 2015

A one-night stay in the city to see Wilhelm von Kaulbach's Zerstörung Jerusalems durch Titus (1846) at the art museum, Neue Pinakothek.Footnote ¹⁹ A monumental oil painting, it dramatizes the fall of the city, the Jews, the Temple, along with the triumph of nascent Christianity. I came to see what no reproduction could unveil – meaningful details of the side episode of ‘Madre Ebrea’, as Antonio Cesti called her in his mid-seventeenth-century Lamento: the woman who, during the siege, cooked and ate her own child.Footnote ²⁰ My mother, it turns out, did not know about this painting. Regular visitors to the Alte Pinakothek, they never stopped at the Neue. Her parents knew why.

The spectacle in von Kaulbach's work is crowded and cacophonic. Here are some details: Romans are trampling on the falling pillars of the Temple, under heavy clouds of smoke emitted by the great fire. At the centre, worldly and otherworldly trumpeters fill the air with triumphant, ominous sounds, above the high priest, who is about to fall on his sword. Demonic creatures haunt the Wandering Jew. On the other side, pious Christians, aided by angels, are walking away, chanting prayers, and carrying martyrs. That's how Christians – more precisely, a modern German Catholic – imagined Jewish destruction, a painting commissioned by a Protestant king to adorn his ‘New Museum’ in Berlin.Footnote ²¹ The cruel Jewish mother's loud lament reverberates in my ears.

I have come full circle: Mothers’ laments at the moment of the Destruction coincide with daughter-of-a-voice's bemoaning, the one heard nearby by Rabbi Yossey. I recall the text published in 1844 on the occasion of the unveiling of the painting: ‘But without a home for itself and its God, [the Jew's] fate is an eternal flight towards an unattainable destination. The Middle Ages … clothed this thought in the legend of the Eternal Jew and Kaulbach has liberally emulated the Middle Ages.’Footnote ²² The sensational picture, in turn, sparked the imagination of a few composers at the second half of that century.Footnote ²³

Walking around a freezing Munich, I take the road through Beethoven Platz to Haydnstraße, where the first Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) of Munich were laid. Munich was late to join this striking pan-European project. On a Stolperstein you are supposed to stumble; it is the closest, living allegory of historical rubble. Coalescing uprootedness with inscription, it generates a memorial.Footnote ²⁴ In this musical street once lived a Jewish family named Benario. Four members of that family were murdered by the Nazis, among them, the renowned communist-militant Olga Benario-Prestes (1908–42). The name and dates of each victim are engraved on a respective copper plate. I walk down to the new synagogue and the adjacent Jewish centre, which attempts to bring the old Jewish-Munich tradition back to life.

* * *

The eve of Israel's Independence Day; for the Palestinians – the day of Nakba (literally meaning disaster). It is time to conclude this travelogue/t-rubble-logue. This year (2021), the day coincides with the beginning of the Ramadan. Daughters-of-a-voice are not lamenting anymore for the Jews, and those moaning for the Palestinians are still barely heard. Rich Adhan calls from the minarets are heard nightly in the promenade where Jews and Muslim–Palestinians are walking, cycling, jogging. An idyllic co-existence? Not really. One or two miles away, Israeli forces evacuate Palestinian families from their houses; sometimes they demolish them.Footnote ²⁵

Uri Agnon, a young composer, wrote an oratorio on their behalf: Custodian – an Oratorio for Choir that Acts (2018). Performed, half clandestinely, at the courtyard of the Jewish National Fund headquarters in Jerusalem, October 2018, it brings, in words and sounds, the predicament of one family against the backdrop of a disgraceful biblical story.Footnote ²⁶ We were there in the audience – the sitting ‘choir’ to which the performing choir ‘preached’: limited in appeal, this performing acte de résistance at the heart of Jerusalem brought together those for whom arbitrarily expropriating, expelling from or demolishing other people's dwellings gnaw at the very vitals of our own existence.Footnote ²⁷ The young performers believe they can change it. Let it be so.