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On October 19, 2000, Heiko Lehmann held a lecture on "Klezmer in Germany/Germans and Klezmer: Reparation or Contribution" at WOMEX in Berlin, House of World Cultures. Here is the complete script:
"Klezmer in Germany/Germans and Klezmer: Reparation or Contribution" by Heiko Lehmann (©) 1. Introduction June 1990. Jerusalem, Ben Yehuda Street. I am in Israel for the first time. It's one month before the German currency was unified, the band is broke and we are busking. A huge crowd gathers, big applause after every tune. When we finish our set a young man throws a coin into the violin case and asks me, "Where are you from?" "Berlin," I answer, and the young man looks at me doubtfully. "Berlin? Germany?" I nod and he asks, "Are you guys Jewish?" "None of us, we are Germans," I say. The young man is in despair and after a while he asks, "Can I take my money back?" I nod and he takes a coin out of the violin case. I was organizing a concert in New York when an older man approached me and offered to be the band's American agent. "We can make loads of money", he promised. "The fact that you guys are from Germany and not Jewish will get us an audience." "Klezmer in Germany" is a topic which fascinates researchers, musicians and audiences alike. Germany has been a major touring country for American-Jewish performers since the 1980s, when Germany, still divided into East and West, first started to produce indigenous klezmer bands. The Internet's Jewish Music List, hosted by Ari Davidow, had a discussion on klezmer in Germany which was very controversial. Contributions ranged from accusations of "necrophilia" to more or less awkward attempts at self-articulation by German Gentile klezmer musicians and singers. This discussion also broached the question of what makes Germans so obsessed, as a lot of people have it, with klezmer. 2. Klezmer in Germany 2.1. - 2.3. Jews in Germany /
Germans and the Jews / East European Jews and
Around the eleventh century there developed a language which was to become the primary language of Ashkenazic Jews until the 19th century, when the Jewish Haskalah in Germany told the Jews to speak German, the national language of the country: this language was Yiddish. Yiddish, or Western Yiddish, as it was spoken in Germany, lost more and more of its importance for most German Jews as they became ever more assimilated, but in Poland, Russia, Lithuania and Rumania Eastern Yiddish was spoken until WWII. Yiddish was a language which developed out of Hebrew, Aramaic, Romanic and German. With the movement of Jews to Eastern Europe before, during and after the Black Plague, the language added Slavic to its components. Yiddish was also a language which gave its speakers the cultural-cognitive model of a link to German culture. Yiddish had so many German words that Jews in East Europe culturally considered themselves much more German than Slavic. It's got to be said, though, that the meaning of those words often changed in Yiddish : the influence and spirit of the Talmud and talmudic principles probed the substance of these words and occasionally redefined them as their very opposites. Still, Ashkenazic Jews felt strongly linked to German culture because of their language. It says a lot that the Germans started very early to exclude Jews from German culture because of Yiddish, which Germans never considered a language but a bad dialect: those people cannot speak German. Richard Wagner, in this case, was just a mouthpiece for public opinion. This paradoxical situation survived until the beginning of WWII, but even now we find Jewish survivors who are unable to understand that it was the Germans, of all people, who attempted to exterminate the Jews. Hasidic Jews were followers of the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, who set up Hasidism in Poland during the first half of the 18th century. Although Hasidism had a lot of opponents among Jews in Poland and Lithuania, it nevertheless spread quickly and gained followers, who brought Hasidic teachings as far away from Poland as Palestine. These Jews had payes (sidelocks), wore caftans, outside synagogue they spoke Yiddish and they also praised God through singing and dancing. To Germans, this was to become a Jewish cliché later, and German Jews during the course of the Haskalah separated themselves from the Hasidim; they wanted to look like Germans. So along with the decline of Yiddish culture in Germany, the tradition of the letsonim or klezmorim also vanished to the point that it became nothing more than a synonym for a stereotype about Jews. Neither German Gentiles nor German Jews liked it, the first thinking of it as ridiculous, the latter being afraid of being taken for Eastern Jews. This trip into history is necessary, as this information forms an important part of a historical Jewish-German conversation. German performers of klezmer music have to put up with it, if they know about it or not. In another chapter of this lecture I will have to go even deeper into history.
Conditions for klezmer music in Germany after WWII were more than bad. There had never been any interest in that music on the part of Germans, who had just attempted to wipe out European Jewry; they had just lost a world war and were the object of the scorn and indignation of the entire world. Nevertheless, it was these same conditions which prepared the Germans for Jewish music. There are records of Yiddish performers touring Jewish D.P. camps in Germany right after the war, but it would be foolish to state that this was the beginning of Jewish music in post-war Germany. The increasing separation of the East and West German sectors, culminating in the founding of two separate German states equally dependent on the countries which had set them up, prevented any common post-war development in Germany. East and West Germany became tools in the hands of cold warriors.
The German Democratic Republic was founded in 1949 as an anti-fascist German state by German communists who had come back from Moscow after the war. The country was occupied by Red Army forces, and Joseph Stalin, the Soviet ruler, was ridden by an anti-Jewish paranoia which made him decide to eliminate the Jews in the Soviet Union; this was stopped only by his death in 1953. Before he died, though, the East Bloc was shaken by anti-Jewish show-trials, such as the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia, which left East Bloc political leaders in no doubt as to his seriousness. The Soviet Union, which had helped make the founding of the state of Israel possible, soon changed its policy , started to support the Arabs against Israel and took care that the communist countries followed this policy. Successfully. The following list of protagonists is incomplete, but it tries to give an overview. Lin Jaldati was sent to concentration camps when the Nazis occupied Holland. She didn't speak Yiddish, but learned Yiddish songs from her fellow prisoners. Jaldati survived Auschwitz; being a communist, she came to East Germany to help establish a socialist German state. She married Eberhard Rebling, a German Gentile communist who later became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and started to perform Yiddish songs for a German audience with Rebling accompanying her on piano. Later they were joined by their daughters Katinka and Jalda. Lin Jaldati dedicated her art and her life to communist East Germany. This didn't prevent her from being banned from performing in the late sixties; the hysteria had gone so far that even performing Yiddish songs was interpreted as a pro-Israel statement. For a long time Lin Jaldati, who was highly accepted by what later became the East German Yiddish and klezmer scene, was the only Yiddish performer in East Germany. Canadian-Jewish singer and banjo player Perry Friedman, also a communist, moved from Canada to East Germany. He made a sincere attempt to establish a kind of a hootenanny tradition in East Germany, but this movement was quickly taken over by the communist youth organization, which turned it into a political song club movement. In the beginning, these hootenanny clubs included Yiddish songs in their repertoire; Friedman occasionally performed Yiddish songs himself. Gerry Wolf is an actor who emigrated to Great Britain during Hitler's rule. After the war he came to East Berlin and became famous as an actor, playing both Jewish and other roles. He starred in two one-person tv broadcasts in which he sang Yiddish songs and told Yiddish stories -- in German. Jurgen Rennert published several books of poetry and essays in East Berlin. He is an excellent poet who became interested in Yiddish and learned the language. Among others, he has translated Sholem Aleykhem, Israel Bercovici and Mark Rasumny into German. Rennert was also the most important initiator of the East Berlin Days of Yiddish Culture festival in the eighties, and he had a huge influence on the little scene in East Berlin. His poetry of the eighties and nineties can be read on www.rennert.de. Ilona Schlott had been a Yiddish performer in Leipzig, which was also home to the Leipziger Synagogalchor (Leipzig Synagogue Choir), none of whose members was Jewish. Singer Dieter Pichowski, a member of the Magdeburg Jewish community, worked on liturgical programs. In Leipzig there was also the translator Hubert Witt, who published the influential collection "The Fiddler of the Ghetto" (Der Fiedler vom Getto, Leipzig 1978). Young people in East Germany who didn't want to take part in or consume official state culture were looking for alternatives. A folk music movement was growing, with centres in Leipzig, Dresden and East Berlin. People also started to look at folk music from other countries. In the early eighties, East Berlin-based singer Karsten Troyke started to perform Yiddish songs. Through sources in the West, Troyke gained access to the music performed by Jewish singers, from cabaret to Israeli songs. He learned the repertoire and actually started to study Yiddish with a teacher in East Berlin, a very rare opportunity, given the small size of the East Berlin Jewish community. Troyke was probably the first one outside official culture to study Yiddish songs seriously; of course there were students who sang Joan Baez versions of Yiddish songs, or Yiddish song versions of Zupfgeigenhansel, a folk music duo from West Germany which had a huge influence. Troyke, who was in his twenties at the time, didn't try to sing copies of copies; he wanted to do his own versions, and he was smart enough to realize that he first had to know a lot about the culture, and that this included learning Yiddish. In 1984 a band was founded in East Berlin which was to become Germany's first klezmer-oriented ensemble. They started with German folk music, but one of the members knew Zupfgeigenhansel's first recording with Yiddish songs and was interested in doing more of this sort of thing (Zupfgeigenhansel's record label was owned at the time by West Germany's Communist Party, which is how the record made its way to the East). So after a short while the band started with Yiddish songs. In the beginning, one could hear where the idea came from; the arrangements were pretty much like Zupfgeigenhansel's. But more and more instrumental music came into their repertoire, and this also influenced the song arrangements. When a bass player joined the band in 1988, they felt ready to focus fifty percent of their repertoire on klezmer music. This band was called Aufwind. Disconnected from the West and the klezmer revival in America, the band's only chance to collect material was to go to East Europe and find Jewish people and places which had survived the Holocaust. The members of the band had no idea whether the fact of Germans playing klezmer and singing Yiddish songs would be accepted by Jews or taken as an insult. They were totally unsure of their skills in this music and were ready to quit if the response by East European Jews was negative. But people encouraged them to continue. Back in East Berlin, Gerry Wolf invited them to both his tv broadcasts with Yiddish songs and stories, and he also worked with them in theatre. In 1988, Aufwind was invited by the state-run record label AMIGA to record its first album. Meanwhile, the annual Days of Yiddish Culture festival in East Berlin, organized by a few people around poet Jurgen Rennert and Jalda Rebling, became a forum for Yiddish performers in East Germany, Jewish or not, and Yiddish writers from the Soviet Union, writers who survived the Stalinist executions; most of them were over seventy years old. Karsten Troyke became the mentor of young Yiddish singers in East Berlin and introduced them to one another, Aufwind got in touch with Lin Jaldati and her family, performers in East Germany had a forum to meet and exchange ideas, often for the very first time. Yiddish and klezmer in East Germany were in a weird position. On the one hand, they were not liked by the officials who suspected the scene of being pro-Israel; on the other hand, their anti-fascist dogma prevented them from forbidding it. So they tolerated the annual festival and the performing activities of the protagonists, but also tried to make use of them by hiring some of them for memorial days; the reason that they allowed Aufwind to record was the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. There were several reasons for Gentiles to learn Yiddish songs. A few Yiddish songs were part of the student culture in the sixties and seventies. Among young Christians, there was certainly guilt, the resulting of the church having provided more information than usual about the Holocaust. Due to the influence of the Zupfgeigenhansel repertoire, some Yiddish songs became part of the folk music repertoire. Other people learned Yiddish songs because they thought of this as a natural part of an anti-fascist song repertoire. And finally, Yiddish and klezmer became a counter culture in opposition to official state culture for some of the East German protagonists.
With the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany became part of the democratic Western world. West Germany tried to maintain good relations with Israel and started to pay reparations. The Germans in West Germany became more and more accepted as partners in policy and arms by their former Western enemies, the American Marshall Plan enabled the Germans to conquer these countries touristically. The Germans felt that they were forgiven -- except for the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the national shame, the mark of Cain that couldn't be wiped off. We should not forget that both East and West Germany were full of former Nazis who were to turn into communists or democrats. East Germany solved the problem by claiming to be in the tradition of an anti-fascist Germany, whatever tradition this had been. In becoming part of the democratic world, West Germany had to put up with the Nazi past. But they just solved their problem by claiming to stand in the tradition of the Weimar Republic, and insisting that Hitler gained power in an undemocratic way. Still, there was the Holocaust. Esther and Abi Ofarim came to perform in Germany and had a huge success. Basically, it was the first Jewish thing aside from guilt that the Germans got after the war. West Germany was trying to get into a German-Jewish dialogue, probably the first one in German-Jewish history. The first German artist in West Germany who got into Yiddish song was singer Peter Rohland in the sixties. He released two albums of Yiddish songs as private editions, and with this he was to influence most of the performers to come. West Germany put up with its folk movement when it came from America as a result of the roots movement. Burg Waldeck played an important role in the self-definition of young songwriters and folk musicians, including Peter Rohland. The student revolt of 1968 asked the uncomfortable question of "What did you do during the war?", which was the only real revolutionary content of the movement. It shook the whole country, Germans Babbitts suddenly were confronted with a past which they had hidden -- their own. Young people started to research the Holocaust, and soon two different ways of dealing with it appeared: a complicated attempt at objective research on the one hand, and a positive view of everything Jewish as a result of guilt on the other. Influenced by Peter Rohland, Yiddish singer Elsbeth Janda and the events at Burg Waldeck, a few young musicians around Hans Bollinger founded a group named ESPE, which started to sing Yiddish songs as early as 1976. Elsbeth Janda, working for the Sudwestfunk radio station, was influenced by Lin Jaldati, who was allowed to perform in the West, one of few East-West connections in that scene. Already in the sixties a band named Kasbek started to perform, and they still do. They played a large variety of East European and Asian music, among them a few Jewish tunes. Zupfgeigenhansel was a well-know folk music duo, which released a longplay with Yiddish songs in 1979. This record and another Yiddish one from 1985 (recorded live in 1980) had a huge influence in both East and West Germany. Thomas Friz of Zupfgeigenhansel released a solo recording of Yiddish songs later. Not to forget Manfred Lemm in Wuppertal, who started his research and work on Yiddish poet Mordekhai Gebirtig. In 1984 Yiddish and klezmer changed in West Germany. For the first time an American klezmer band, one of the bands who pioneered the klezmer revival in America, came to tour Germany: New York's Kapelye. Giving interviews to the German press, tv and radio stations, they noticed what other American-Jewish musicians were also to notice later: "Whenever I mention the Holocaust, she stops writing." (Henry Sapoznik, Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World, p. 224, New York 1999). American musician and ethnomusicologist Joshua Horowitz, who speaks an excellent German, later observed that whenever he mentioned the Holocaust in a tv interview, it got cut out. Anyway, German performers had the chance to see Yiddish songs and klezmer music performed by "authentic" musicians, i.e. Jewish musicians. 1984 was also the year when director Peter Zadek invited Israeli clarinetist Giora Feidman to participate in his production of Joshua Sobol's Ghetto. Kapelye and Feidman paved the way to Germany for American-Jewish performers. They were to come back. Yiddish songs in West Germany were not actually blooming, but there were other Gentile and Jewish performers, including Lin Jaldati and her family from the East. Reasons to deal with this music were similar in both parts, young people in the late sixties also sang Yiddish songs to express their differences with their parents and grandparents. Information on the Holocaust was much easier to get, but philosemitism also played a big role. Many bands in West Germany, older or young, were interested in East European music. Some of them went East to do research, some worked with immigrants from East Europe; it was much easier for East Germans to go to the East. The difficulties of getting and staying in contact with each other stood in the way of any functional cooperation between Eastern and Western bands and performers, with the exception of a few contacts allowed by the officials. Among the unofficial exceptions was the contact between Aufwind and the Hamburg-based band Bolshe Vita.
When the Wall came down in 1990, Aufwind received a lot of offers to tour West Germany. The band had no competition in the field of klezmer and toured until they decided to stop touring the West for a while. The sole reason was the difference in audience: whereas in East Germany the band's audience had been very young, interested people who asked questions and discussed the music and texts (at this time Aufwind was still reading Rennert's translations of Yiddish texts on stage), the audience in West Germany in the early nineties consisted almost entirely of older people, a large part of whom had been young adults or older at the time of the Nazi regime. This audience didn't discuss; it sat and applauded, no matter what happened on stage, at least in Aufwind's opinion. The band was not used to this situation. In 1990 and 1991, they were invited to be the first foreign band to perform at the Safed Klezmer Festival. The state of having no competition soon changed.
Giora Feidman started to give workshops, as did bands of the American
klezmer revival. They taught German musicians to play klezmer, and these
Germans started their own bands. In the beginning most of these bands
were weak, and most fell apart after a short while. But some remained,
or musicians from different bands got together and started another band.
The workshop circuit had conquered the whole country. The scene which
gave the workshops was bitterly split between Giora Feidman and his master
students and the bands of the American revival, all of whom argued against
each other. The situation simplified: most of the American bands followed
an American-Jewish klezmer conception focused on old recordings of Naftule
Brandwein or Dave The beginning of the nineties was marked by a klezmer boom, featuring dozens, later hundreds, of new German klezmer bands. Although not many of them survived, the scene got bigger and bigger. The longer a band or musician was on the scene, the more one could tell if the band or musician was undergoing a musical development or just following a fad for a while. The more bands were founded, the greater the longing to receive the imprimatur of an American or Israeli klezmer musician; the workshop business blossomed. Starting around 1997, the average level of the German bands began to rise. Some people realized that a certain knowledge of Jewish culture was necessary, and that the musicianship of a band could be measured by the degree to which they had become independent from their workshop idols. Still, the quality of German klezmer bands varied widely, and the only new motive to play Jewish music was that you might be able to make some money from it. Unfortunately (aside from a few exceptions), klezmer was still taken by its protagonists as either a party or as a personal statement, not as a music. Germany became the biggest market for klezmer music in the world.
3.1. Antisemitism in Germany 3.1.1. Short History of antisemitism in Germany
Antisemitism is very complex, and given the number of books attempting to explain it and its origins, it seems very difficult to analyze. I will not try to add anything to these writings because I am not a specialist. But to search for antisemitic tendencies today, we have to know what we are looking for. When Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the State religion, the Church, still weak and not very well established, felt itself in competition with the Jews. They had been the chosen people, the entire Bible was about their history and their relationship to God, but they denied the Messiah. The Jews didn't want to convert, and to heathens Judaism could be as attractive as Christianity. So the Church started its fight against its competitors. The major accusation was that the Jews had killed God, so they had to be allies of the Devil. This was preached from every pulpit of the Roman Empire, and it continued after its fall, for one and a half thousand years. Peasants' and workers' conception of the world had been simple, there was Good and Evil, and in a Christian world Good meant God (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) and His people, Evil meant the Devil, and the Devil's people were the Jews. The Jews became synonymous with the devil and as such an integral and irreplaceable part of the Christian conception of the world. People didn't need to be reminded, Jews became part of a cognitive model that even children used to get along in their world, such as "Fire burns you, bears are dangerous." With the Enlightenment, God and the Devil went out of fashion as patterns for explaining the world. Jews were no longer connected with the devil, but the cognitive model was so deep in the subconscious of even the Enlightenment's educated philosophers, that instead of revising the whole picture they just looked for another explanation for the evil of the Jews. Suddenly the Jews weren't evil because they were the devil's people, they were evil because the evil was IN them. This lead to so called racial antisemitism: Jews were evil because of their blood; the whole "race" of Jews was cursed because they possessed the Evil and couldn't do anything against it. This form of antisemitism was a very important step: it finally invalidated the Christian dogma of redemption through conversion, i.e. the evil within the Jews was so strong that not even God could help it--the evil could only be destroyed by destroying the Jews. Indeed, the Catholic and Protestant churches gave way to this dogma as soon as the Nazis demanded it. The Nazis' racial definition of what is Jewish held that converted Jews were Jewish, and nothing else. This conception was unthinkable without the Enlightenment redefinition of Jews and Evil and the subsequent establishment of racial, eliminationist antisemitism. One sign of antisemitism is the role played by Jews in popular thought. Germans of the 19th century were obsessed with Jews. The small number of Jews in Germany led to the production of hundreds and hundreds of printed articles, books and pamphlets against them. Germans actually believed that the Jews were their misfortune. Even Gentile friends of the Jews (von Treitschke, who invented the slogan "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck" in 1879, thought that he was a liberal friend of the Jews) said that the precondition of Jewish emancipation was conversion to Christianity, and they denied even this "chance" to them as soon as they started to define Jews racially. So the cultural-cognitive model of the Jew remained in the heads of the people, only the content changed a bit and became highly explosive. The Jewish Haskalah as a movement of complete devotion and assimilation to German culture, the attempt to think and look just like the Germans, was turned by the paranoid heads of the Germans into a Jewish threat to take over the whole country. There were antisemitic writings around 1890 saying, "We lost the war against the Jews in 1849." The 20th century brought the unbelievably influential "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". In the early 1920s Hitler for the first time stated publicly that the Jews have to be eliminated, and when he gained power everybody knew what he wanted. He had written it in his talentless written but best-selling "Mein Kampf".
It is unlikely that the deep and over thousand year old cognitive model of Jews stopped existing right after the war was lost. In both parts of Germany antisemitic expressions were forbidden by law, but it is not possible to forbid a subconscious. Given the fact that young Germans of today scrawl swastikas on walls and destroy Jewish cemeteries (and they have always done so, no matter if East or West), considering the fact that there are people who openly speak of a global Jewish plot against Germany, in the face of a nation-wide organized neo-Nazi movement (and a completely passive German state), it should be said that antisemitism in Germany has never stopped. According to Goldhagen, antisemitism can be more or less visible, but as long as the cultural-cognitive model exists it will not disappear. If young people become Nazis today, they must have received this model from somewhere, which means that it exists. So what about the others? Jews are still dominant in the heads of Germans, but the reasons have changed. The Holocaust left the Germans with a huge guilt. Germans are conscious of the fact that the whole world is watching them and anything they do. So the Germans developed a certain kind of political correctness towards anything Jewish, which needs a certain effort to be carried out. So every time they deal with anything Jewish in public, they get reminded that this is because of the Jews. They are conscious that anything Jewish gets a special treatment because the Germans are responsible for the Holocaust. Jews in Germany always got a special treatment, and it killed them almost completely. I think it is dangerous, because any kind of special treatment is antisemitic at the end.
Another result of the Holocaust is philosemitism. There are many Germans who think anything Jewish is great and beyond criticism. Philosemitism here mostly grows out of guilt and the angst about doing something wrong, but philosemitism can turn into antisemitism anytime. The longing to participate in that Jewish greatness actually drove people to convert to Judaism. And it drove people to learn Yiddish songs or klezmer tunes and perform them in public. Clarinetist Giora Feidman, who has lived in the USA for many years, actually makes use of this. In his workshops and concerts he offers redemption from guilt to his German audience: Everybody can be a klezmer (i.e. Jewish; this is probably not intended by Feidman, but that's how his German audience understands it). The urge of German musicians to receive the "klezmer-dubbing", the "authenticity certificate" by playing in front of Jewish musicians and being told that it sounds OK, is another sign of uncertainty at least about how to proceed with anything Jewish. I should mention that this is valid for only a part of the German Yiddish and klezmer scene. Antisemitism exists in Germany, and it would be a surprise if it didn't. It is present, and it is violent in neo-Nazi attacks against Jewish people or Jewish institutions. If German society happens to master the neo-Nazi problem, which would include a search for antisemitism in itself, forms of philosemitism/special treatment will just be a sign of the impossibility of "normal" German-Jewish relations.
Klezmer music in Germany is both. Some performers
want to take an active part in the restoration of East European Jewish
culture. This position is problematic but not unintelligible. The fact
that their efforts are mostly not accepted by Jewish people always shocks
them. The protagonists have no answer to the question of how to restore
East European Jewish culture without the actual Jews.
There is a klezmer music scene in Germany with bands of varying levels of achievement, just as there is in any other country. The influences of the folk movement, of workshops held by bands of the American klezmer revival and, most importantly, by Giora Feidman, were important in the establishment of this scene. The success of these workshops resulted from the fact that Germans felt themselves incorporated by the Jewish musicians, and that Giora Feidman, especially, offered them a solution to the psychological dilemma of being a part of a nation which is responsible for the Holocaust, even if you were born after the war. It is inevitable that the German klezmer scene is penetrated to a large degree by this dilemma, and there's no doubt that the German klezmer and Yiddish scene wouldn't exist without the Holocaust. This means that to some bands and artists the music and the culture is not the centre of their attention; this does not help the music. Since the Holocaust did happen and will influence the lives of still unborn generations of Jews and Germans, I understand the German klezmer scene that has resulted from it. German performers don't play the music for a Jewish audience, they play it for a German audience, because it is obviously the Germans who need it. My guess is that the less the klezmer music played by Germans is burdened with the personal problems of the protagonists, the better it is for the music. If the music is good, there will be an audience. Germans playing Jewish music are invited to try to stay away from philosemitism, because it is a form of antisemitism (or as Canadian Yiddish singer Wolf Krakowski puts it, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions.") Klezmer music is not a tool for reparation, although it is used that way. You can't undo the Holocaust. The only chance for Germans to play this music AND to receive acknowledgment is to be good musicians and to know as much about the culture as is possible for an outsider. And: klezmer music is not a museum. Even if it is hard, German performers have to try to contribute to the music.
Heiko Lehmann, born 1963, is a musician, composer and author who plays klezmer music since 1988, when he was hired as their first bass player by Aufwind in East Berlin. In 1992 he came to KlezKamp for the first time, the next year he played his last concert with Aufwind at KlezKamp. In 1994 he started a collaboration with Canadian writer Michael Wex, in 1995 they founded Golus Storytheatre (Toronto-Berlin) and performed their first production, God in Paris, at the first Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto. Three more productions were to come, all of them in English and German versions, Lehmann being responsible for the German translations and the music. He also translated Michael Wex´s great novel Shlepping the Exile into German (which was published in 1988 by a Zurich publisher). Lehmann was invited to play with several bands such as Kapelye, Budowitz, The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble,Willy Schwarz, Bill Popp and others. He´s currently playing with SUKKE, a first European klezmer all-star band, and directing his first musical "Die Meistersinger von Dlugaszow" to be performed at the festival in Chemnitz/Saxonia in March 2001. Lehmann lives in Berlin.
© 2000 by Heiko Lehmann. All rights reserved. The author would like to thank Michael Wex for his help with the English.
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