The Inextinguishable Symphony, A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany, Martin Goldsmith (345 pp., John Wiley and Sons, HB $24.95).(Review)

The Inextinguishable Symphony, A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany, Martin Goldsmith (345 pp., John Wiley and Sons, HB $24.95)

Martin Goldsmith hosted NPR's Performance Today for well over a decade and is well known among classical music aficionados as an erudite commentator on the whole of classical music literature as well as its current and former practitioners. The Inextinguishable Symphony, part gentle memoir, part periodic history, and part collaborative indictment, is first and foremost an eminently readable tale of Goldsmiths's parents' (Gunther Goldschmidt and Rosemarie Gumpert) musical maturation and eventual flight from pre-War Nazi Germany. It is also a studied look at the Kulturbund deutsche Juden or Judischer Kulturbund, the "Jewish Culture Club," the "Kubu," which flourished under the aegis of the National Socialists both as a haven for Jewish actors, writers, singers, and musicians and as Goebbels's propaganda tool. It is finally a chilling and very personal recounting of how the Nazis disenfranchised a significant portion of the indigenous German peoples solely on the basis of race.

Goldsmith lays bare the systematic degradation of Germany's Jews starting with the civil service "reforms"of 1933, through the Nuremburg laws, Kristallnacht, and a steady stream of progressively repressive measures, the slightest transgression of which was dealt with swiftly and harshly, offenders shipped off at first to forced labor camps and later concentration camps. The Goldschmidts and their families experienced all of these. In fact, there seems to have been a Goldschmidt or a Gumpert at or near nearly every significant event during those fateful years prior to the War. One uncle, Hugo, and a cousin were even aboard the doomed St. Louis as it languished in Havana's harbor, eventually depositing its refugee cargo into Vichy French detention camps. Eventually, they would suffer the fate of any Goldschmidt or Gumpert not fortunate enough to have emigrated.

However, among the three central themes, the most riveting is the rise and fall of the Kubu, first under the direction of the irrepressible promoter, Kurt Singer, and then under the careful guidance of Werner Levie. The Judischer Kulturbund was created by Goebbels's propaganda office essentially to provide cover for the Nazis' persecution of Germany's Jews. It served, initially as a series of regional organizations and later centralized in Berlin, as both an employment bureau for actors, musicians, singers, and so on, and an outlet for the arts: theatre, opera, poetry, chamber music, and larger-scale orchestral works. Since the civil service "reforms" denied any Jew of state employment, and since most theaters and orchestras in pre-War Germany were state contrivances of one stripe or another, literally thousands of musicians, singers, and actors relied on the Kubu's largesse for their livelihood. Goldsmith describes the Kubu's lurching existence with sympathy and candor. He portrays Singer's megalomania without apology, while putting Levie's comparatively weak leadership into context: the Nazis couldn't resist playing high-stakes games with their cynical showcase.

The story of how Gunther Ludwig Goldschmidt and Rosemarie Gumpert Goldschmidt meet, join the different Kubu orchestras, and finally flee Germany for the United States ...