George Orwell

 

Dear friends of piano music,

"you can read it", a friend said to me, "the reality is much worse". i don't know exactly what it is that i have been trying unsuccessfully for years to finish reading "1984" by George Orwell. It's a dystopia, the antithesis of utopia, the hopeful, positive blueprint for the future. For me, 1984 is the end of individual thought and action in a world that has also become ugly on the outside, caused by a totalitarian state. Perhaps it is a kind of family trauma that makes me put the book down again and again. Although I am already the third generation to have escaped from such a state, it is still burned into my thinking and feeling, the fear of losing this freedom. We have it - we can read everything, think everything, do almost everything. But what do we do with this achievement of intellectual enlightenment - "sapere aude", have the courage to use your intellect, think for yourself?

 At the moment we are indirectly under police protection, because we live directly behind a synagogue. I don't think there will be such incidents in present-day Heidelberg either, at least I hope so. In our street, too, there are the so-called "Stolpersteine" (stumbling stones), which are small commemorative plaques set into the pavements in front of houses where people of the Jewish faith once lived - it is also noted there when they had to leave their home, whether they managed to escape or whether they were killed in a concentration camp. It is not easy to explain these plaques to the children, because of course they ask about them. But it is good that they are there, that there is a culture of remembrance of this inhumanity, even if it should of course not become a kind of modern selling of indulgences - every person is responsible for his or her own actions, it is good not to forget the atrocities of one's ancestors, but of course it is not enough, it should not obscure the view of what one could do better oneself.

 I have never understood how one can love a whole group belonging to a certain religion or nationality and hate and despise another in its entirety. I love, say, the Austrians - who then, Mozart or „The Great Dictator”? No, not that I want to impute this monster to our neighbouring country, but Hitler was an inferior Austrian painter who painted appallingly bad pictures and got no recognition for it from anyone. Why did no one ever notice that he in no way corresponded to the racial characteristics he propagated, which were unsurpassable in terms of stupidity - tall, blond, blue-eyed? Did he not even look in the mirror to realise how untrustworthy he actually was? and how was he able to get so frighteningly far with this nonsense? But let's pursue this thought - I love the Germans - who then, „The Reich Minister of Propaganda“ or Beethoven? The Germans, that's a group of very individual people who all fall somewhere between these two poles, these extreme points, the pathological inhuman and the wonderful genius, the gift of the gods to mankind. So it is impossible to love such a heterogeneous group in its entirety. One can love individual human beings, and in the case of Beethoven, at any rate, this is particularly easy for me, and beyond that, all human beings, all living beings on this earth, because the one group is just as heterogeneous as the other. Anything else would be illogical; there are no universal characteristics in any group that are present in every one of its representatives and that are fundamentally better than the (imagined) characteristics of another group. Pure logic. When Hannah Ahrend speaks of the "banality of evil", the concept of the banal resonates for me with quite banal stupidity, mental sloth and unenlightenment. Only a few people are "evil " by nature; I consider that a pathological phenomenon. Otherwise, I am firmly convinced that those who read and understand books do not burn them. No one who has read and understood Kästner or Heine would be able to burn these books. No one who has studied a religion other than their own in depth would burn its holy scriptures, because relatively quickly you realise how much good there is in each of these scriptures, how much there is to unite them, and how interesting the culturally conditioned differences are. This is my utopia, my alternative to 1984. It is probably nothing more than a humanistic educational ideal, but I firmly and steadfastly believe in it. Read, learn, use your intellect and see this quality as the greatest good of human beings. But let's give the last word to my beloved Beethoven, who signed one of his letters with "Ludwig van Beethoven, brain owner".

Kerstin