An epigram for the Charter of Human Responsibilities (though personally I see no need to involve God in this when the whole point is Human Responsibility; and would therefore substitute 'Humankind' each time he names Him):
“Who stands firm? Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason,
his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to
sacrifice all these, when in faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to
obedient and responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be
nothing but an answer to God's question and call.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
By 1937 Dohnányi had established close friendships with a number of Wehrmacht officers, led by Chief of Staff Ludwig Beck, Colonel Hans Oster of the Abwehr, and the head of the Abwehr itself, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. All three were opposed to the planned Anschluss of Czechoslovakia, wished to overthrow Hitler, and were working towards a post-Hitler arrangement with the British that would not punish Germany, a deal scuppered when Chamberlain and the French went to Munich to use "appeasement" as a euphemism for "grovelling before a nasty bully you're too scared and too uunready to stand up to".
Dohnányi's fall came as a consequence of Stalingrad, where the Nazis suffered their first defeat, and blamed it on the Abwehr. His connection with Bonhoeffer didn't help much either, and the two were named together when military prosecutor Manfred Roeder executed his arrest warrants on April 5th 1943. The official charge was embezzlement, but the word "traitor" was also in the air. While Bonhoeffer was at the Tegel, Dohnány was taken to Das Zellengefängnis, the prison for officers on Lehrterstraße, and Christine Dohnány-Bonhoeffer, sister of the one and wife of the other, to the women's prison in Charlottenburg, from where she was released after just a week.
My special thanks to Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, who unknowingly provided much of the research data on Hans and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from their book "The Tragedy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi".
Diary, July 2024: Coming up Goulston Street rather than Old Castle Street to Aldgate East for my evening coffee, the other side than my usual of the Met Uni, there is a plaque on the wall there, about which nothing more needs saying than what is on it, unless, perhaps: how had I never noticed it or even known about it before:
"St Paul's German Evangelical Reformed Church which stood on this site until 1941"
- in other words: victim of the Blitz. As was the man named on it, though in his case it was the blitz against dissenters rather than buildings:
"Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945, German Theologian, Christian martyr, Pastor 1933-5"
Because I no
longer have Pandora Radio (it has no license to broadcast in the UK), and I can't
listen to music on the radio while I'm working because it constantly goes to
ads or news or simply the idle chatter of the anchor, all of which breaks my
concentration, I have taken to calling up my favourite pieces on YouTube and
listening that way. Or did, until I got bored hearing them for the hundredth
time, and started randomly hitting those squares of cookie-generated pictures
that come up at the end of a YouTube video, to try to drive you to pages with
paid ads on them - I mean recommendations algorithmed to your taste. And then I
discovered that my YouTube site tracks its own history, so I have a list of all
these nameless pieces, and can listen to them again, or find more by the same
composer – and guess what, just like the painters (see my blog for April 16), it
turns out that there have actually been rather more first-rate composers in the
world than just the couple of dozen in the Hall of Fame.
As I write
this I am listening to one of them, Ernő Dohnányi to be
precise, his Symphony No. 1, and liking it so much I want to know more about this man, of whom I
have truthfully never even heard before. And so I look him up, yea, even on
Wikipedia though self-evidently there are better sites, and… why have I never heard of this man who deserves immediate
membership in my Book of Days catalogue of the forgotten who should not have
been forgotten?
My eastern
European guess turns out to have been dead right; he was born in what was then
Pozsony in Hungary, but is now Bratislava in Slovakia, on July 27th 1877, and
made his name, using its German form, Ernst von Dohnányi, as a
pianist and conductor, as well as a composer – he died, for the
information, on February 9th, 1960, of pneumonia mostly, in Florida. As a pianist, by all accounts, he was decidedly
Lisztian; as a composer a devout follower of Brahms, who promoted his work in
Vienna and supported him as a mentor; and as a conductor he became a key figure
in the careers of both Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály; but it isn't his work in
any of these three fields that makes him worthy of commemoration here.
My criterion
for membership of the Zero Positive Club automatically rejects people who are passively complicit in the
events of life and history; black-lists those who, even worse, collaborate in
their own victimhood; but selects for instant statuisation those who stand up
to life and history when life and history indulge their tendency to bully; who
seek, however haplessly, to make the Zero Positive, who pursue, however
abjectly, the Immaculate Failure.
This litmus test Dohnányi
passes, and I will explain why shortly; but first, equally unknown to me until
I undertook this little piece of research, and even more meritorious of entry
into this garden of the righteous, there is the separate tale of Hans von Dohnányi - Dohnányi Junior shall I call him - Ernő’s son with his first wife Elisabeth (Elsa) Kunwald; Hans who became one of
the leaders of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, a friend
and collaborator, the boss and brother-in-law indeed, of that decidedly
righteously-gentile anti-Semitic defender of Jewry Dietrich Bonhoeffer (I do love these paradoxes of the
pulchrasauri!).
Bonhoeffer
was a German Lutheran pastor, one of the founders of the Bekennende Kirche, or Confessing
Church (whose anti-Semitism lay in its belief that Judaism had been rendered
obsolete by the supersession of Christianity, and that Jews should therefore
convert, or at the very least assimilate and become secular, like his good
friend Hans von Dohnányi),
and trained clergy at its seminary at Finkenwalde, until the Nazis closed
it down and he spent two years in hiding.
So dissident was he in his opposition to the Nazis, so heroically unwise in his outspokenness against Hitler's euthanasia program, so foolishly derogatory in his public denunciation of the persecution of the Jews, that he was banned from Berlin in 1938, and prohibited from speaking in public anywhere in 1940. Finally, he was dragged from his metaphorical pulpit by the Gestapo in April 1943, and accused with what at that time was his boss, Hans von Dohnányi, of embezzling funds for personal use from the Abwehr, the Office of Military Intelligence, which Dohnányi Junior ran; supposedly the organisation that promoted the expansion of Nazism beyond the country's borders, Dohnányi was using it to create and fund an anti-Nazi resistance. Bonhoeffer was held at Tegel Prison for nearly eighteen months before being transferred to Buchenwald, with the additional charge of association in a plot to assassinate Hitler. His fellow defendants included several former members of the Abwehr, though ironically not yet Dohnányi, who was still considered loyal. Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging on April 9th 1945, just when the Nazi regime was getting ready for its own gallows.
So dissident was he in his opposition to the Nazis, so heroically unwise in his outspokenness against Hitler's euthanasia program, so foolishly derogatory in his public denunciation of the persecution of the Jews, that he was banned from Berlin in 1938, and prohibited from speaking in public anywhere in 1940. Finally, he was dragged from his metaphorical pulpit by the Gestapo in April 1943, and accused with what at that time was his boss, Hans von Dohnányi, of embezzling funds for personal use from the Abwehr, the Office of Military Intelligence, which Dohnányi Junior ran; supposedly the organisation that promoted the expansion of Nazism beyond the country's borders, Dohnányi was using it to create and fund an anti-Nazi resistance. Bonhoeffer was held at Tegel Prison for nearly eighteen months before being transferred to Buchenwald, with the additional charge of association in a plot to assassinate Hitler. His fellow defendants included several former members of the Abwehr, though ironically not yet Dohnányi, who was still considered loyal. Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging on April 9th 1945, just when the Nazi regime was getting ready for its own gallows.
Which brings
us back to Hans, Dohnányi Junior, a lawyer at the Ministry of Justice since 1929, where he
served first as an aide to State Secretary Curt Jöel, himself a decidedly
conservative Jew, and then, after Hitler came to power, as assistant to Minister
of Justice Franz Gürtner, a conservative non-Nazi lawyer whom Hitler kept on to
reassure people that the "law" remained in non-Nazi hands. Both detested the
Nazis, and Gürtner supported Dohnányi's clandestine cataloguing of the records
of Nazi "crimes" for which his office was the principal archive.
By 1937 Dohnányi had established close friendships with a number of Wehrmacht officers, led by Chief of Staff Ludwig Beck, Colonel Hans Oster of the Abwehr, and the head of the Abwehr itself, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. All three were opposed to the planned Anschluss of Czechoslovakia, wished to overthrow Hitler, and were working towards a post-Hitler arrangement with the British that would not punish Germany, a deal scuppered when Chamberlain and the French went to Munich to use "appeasement" as a euphemism for "grovelling before a nasty bully you're too scared and too uunready to stand up to".
With his
privileged access to all this information (including, after the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, certain knowledge of the Final Solution), and his
promotion as Oster's deputy in the Abwehr (a position, incidentally, which
would have included some level of familiarity with another senior Abwehr
officer, the man who would serve as agent provocateur for the invasion of
Poland, that other falsely-named righteous gentile Major Oskar Schindler), Dohnányi
now became the effective leader of the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, and was
specifically instructed by Canaris to seek out former politicians who had been
victimised by Hitler, and prepare them for a post-Nazi government. But what
Canaris did not know was Operation 7, which later became Operation 14 - seven
Jews who he had learned were designated for the death-camps, who he informed
the Gestapo were "Abwehr agents" - which meant "informers" in a land where
every third person really was an informer, but almost none of those were Jewish
- and therefore protected. The Gestapo sent them to the safety of Switzerland,
imagining they would report on Nazi enemies there.
Dohnány and Bonhoeffer spent three months under interrogation, mostly in
solitary confinement, until the charge of treason was dropped, embezzlement was
replaced by "currency violations", and a new charge was added, that of "Wehrkraftzersetzung" – sedition and defeatism.
 |
Already dealing with phlebitis from the
unhygienic conditions in which he was living, Hans suffered a brain embolism in
November of that year, when an Allied bomb effectively destroyed the
Lehrterstraße prison. But what destroyed him finally was the last attempt to
assassinate Hitler, which saw his close allies Beck and Canaris, along with
Claus von Stauffenberg, Werner von Haeften, General Friedrich Olbricht, and many others,
murdered on July 20th 1944 as a punishment for their failed attempt on the
Reichsfuhrer's life. Oster was arrested the following day. Ernst Kaltenbrunner,
Himmler's deputy, was appointed to hunt down more suspects, of which some six
thousand were eventually arrested, sham-tried, and executed; Dohnány's supposed "loyalty" now found out in the process.
On August 22nd he was transferred to the
hospital at Sachsenhausen, which was so well maintained against disease that he
quickly contracted scarlet fever. In September the "catalogue of crimes" was
discovered among his papers, and Hitler became personally involved in the
prosecution of what the Gestapo had now named "the spiritual head of the
conspiracy against Hitler"; probably accurately; he had twice attempted to
assassinate Hitler – the first time with Canaris in Smolensk, with a
British-made bomb that sadly failed to detonate.
When he was taken for
execution in April 1945, he was so sick they had to carry him to the gallows on
a stretcher. He left behind one son, Christoph von Dohnányi, who would follow
his grandfather into music and become Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra, and another, Klaus von
Dohnányi, who would become a German politician in the years of apology and
rebuilding.
Which tale
leads back to the father, and to Berlin, and to Brahms' friend the violinist Joseph
Joachim, who invited Erno to teach at the Hochschule there, which he
did from 1905 to 1915, and where he met the actress, singer and ballet dancer Elza
Galafrés, soon to be ex-wife of the Polish Jewish
violinist Bronisław Huberman, who he would marry in 1919.
In those days it wasn't yet Nazism that did the serious bullying; it was Communism, and quite probably it was the father's
experience that later inspired the son. When Hungary
went Communist in 1919, Ernő was appointed director of the Budapest
Academy, only to be fired shortly afterwards for refusing to fire Zoltán Kodály for being a leftist. The
following year, when Communism temporarily failed and Admiral Horthy was made Regent,
Ernő became music director of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra,
where among others he taught Georg Solti
and, in 1933, organised the first International
Franz Liszt Piano Competition.
Then, in 1934,
he was reappointed as Director of the Budapest Academy, a post he held
until 1943, and which has given rise to comments that he "collaborated" with
the Nazis – a charge lodged in much the same manner, and equally falsely, against Richard Strauss. Because there is the small-scale resistance of father Ernő, and there is the large-scale resistance of son Hans, but both are nonetheless resistance, and both, in the circumstances of Nazi Germany, were utterly heroic. So I read in Grove's
Dictionary how, from 1939, "much of his time was devoted to the
fight against growing Nazi influences". By 1941 he had resigned his directorial
post at the Academy, rather than submit to the anti-Jewish legislation. In his
orchestra he succeeded in keeping on all Jewish members until two months after
the German occupation of Hungary [on March 12th 1944, in Operation Margarethe], when he disbanded
the ensemble as an act of John-Galtian protest. In November 1944 he went to
Austria, a decision which has added further criticism.
And yet, in
March 2014, at a conference entitled "The Holocaust in Hungary, 70 Years
On: New Perspectives" held at the Center for Judaic, Holocaust, &
Genocide Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, the
musicologist James A. Grymes presented research based on archival evidence he
had gathered in Budapest, in a paper entitled "Ernst von Dohnányi: A Forgotten Hero of the Holocaust Resistance" Ernst (Ernő), not Hans. He
credits Ernst with (in the author's summary):
1) "blocking the creation of a Hungarian Chamber of Music that would have excluded Jews from the music profession, just as the infamous Reichsmusikkammer did in Nazi Germany";2) resigning "from his position as Director General of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, rather than carry out orders to fire Jewish instructors";3) "As the conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic, Dohnányi disbanded the ensemble rather than dismiss its Jewish members";4) Assisting "a number of individual Jewish musicians".
These
included (I am still quoting Grymes) impresario Andrew Schulhof, whom Dohnányi helped emigrate from Germany
to the U.S. in 1939. When the pianist Lajos Hernádi had been discharged from the labour service, Dohnányi wrote a letter declaring
Hernádi and his hands to be irreplaceable national treasures. When the violinist Carl Flesch and his wife were threatened with deportation to a concentration camp, Dohnányi helped to reinstate
their Hungarian nationalities, enabling them to travel through Germany, back to
Hungary, and ultimately to Switzerland. He also personally saved the
pianist György Ferenczy,
Ferenczy's wife, and several other Jewish musicians from the death
trains. Zoltán Kodály later reported that Dohnányi
had signed dozens of documents that had saved Jewish lives during the
Holocaust. In "Ernst von Dohnányi: A Song of Life", Dohnányi’s widow Ilona
placed that number in the hundreds. Jewish violinist, violist, and
composer Tibor Serly went so far as to credit
Dohnányi's frequent interventions for the fact that "Not one Jewish musician of
any reputation living in Hungary lost his life or perished during the entire
period of World War II". (Of those he was unable to save, one was a near namesake of Andrew Schulhof: the composer Erwin Schulhoff - what happened to him, and what would have happened to those that Dohnányi saved, can be read on April 1 of this blog-book).
Grymes notes
the fact that, after the war, Dohnányi "was investigated and cleared
several times by the U.S. Military Government", as a precondition of his
post-war move to Florida. Grymes also notes that he was "repeatedly
defended by prominent Jewish musicians who had worked closely with him in
Hungary, including violist Egon Kenton [Kornstein], pianist Edward
Kilenyi, musicologist Bence
Szabolcsi, and composer Leó Weiner.
The latter wrote at least two testimonials pointing out that the majority of
Dohnányi's students had been Jewish, and that Dohnányi had consistently
programmed Weiner's own compositions, even during the Nazi regime".
In 1946, Ernő was made an honorary member of the Epsilon Iota Chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity at the Florida State University in Tallahassee, and went on to teach at the School of Music there from 1949 to 1959. He and his third wife Ilona
became American citizens in 1955. His last public performance was held there, on January 30th 1960, conducting the university orchestra in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, with his doctoral student,
Edward R. Thaden, as soloist. He then went to New York to record several
Beethoven piano pieces for Everest
Records; these are the only surviving recordings of his work besides a Mozart concerto (No. 17, in G major,
K. 453) which was made in the early 1930s, in Hungary, with the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra; his
own "Variations on a Nursery Tune"; and the second movement of his "Ruralia
Hungarica"; all of those are on 78 rpm, and therefore unlikely
to be played by anyone ever again; he died in New York shortly after that recording session.
By such few accounts as there are of his playing, his rendition of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata and
Haydn's Fminor Variations were particularly good, as are the recordings of his
compositions made by LSU Professor
Milton Hallman, who was a student of Dohnányi's before eventually taking over his professorship.
You can find his CD of Dohnányi's compositions, "Works For Piano", at Centaur
Records. The Hungarian government posthumously awarded him its highest
civilian honour, the Kossuth Prize, in 1990. An International
Ernst von Dohnányi Festival was held at Florida State University in 2002.
 |
| Dohnányi's gravesite at Roselawn Cemetery, Tallahassee, Florida, USA |
My special thanks to Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, who unknowingly provided much of the research data on Hans and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from their book "The Tragedy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi".
Diary, July 2024: Coming up Goulston Street rather than Old Castle Street to Aldgate East for my evening coffee, the other side than my usual of the Met Uni, there is a plaque on the wall there, about which nothing more needs saying than what is on it, unless, perhaps: how had I never noticed it or even known about it before:
- in other words: victim of the Blitz. As was the man named on it, though in his case it was the blitz against dissenters rather than buildings:
"Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945, German Theologian, Christian martyr, Pastor 1933-5"
You can find David Prashker at:
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