In the summer of 1933, the violinist Ernest Drucker, a student at a conservatory in Cologne, was selected to play a Brahms concerto at his graduation ceremony. At the demand of the Nazis, he was forced to halt after the first movement. His son Eugene recently performed the work at a special concert in Israel in honor of Nazi Germany’s Jewish musicians, as Aron Heller writes:
With tears in his eyes, [Eugene] Drucker performed an emotional rendition of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 over the weekend with the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra.
“I think he would feel a sense of completion. I think in some ways many aspects of my career served that purpose for him,” the sixty-three-year-old Drucker said of his father, who passed away in 1993. “There is all this emotional energy and intensity loaded into my associations with this piece.”
Thursday’s concert, and a second performance Sunday night, commemorated the Jüdischer Kulturbund—a federation of Jewish musicians in Nazi Germany who were segregated so as not to “sully” Aryan culture. After the humiliation in Cologne, the elder Drucker became a central player in the Kulturbund, a unique historical phenomenon with a mixed legacy.
On the one hand, it gave Jews the opportunity to carry on with their cultural lives and maintain a sense—some would say the illusion—of normalcy in the midst of growing discrimination against them. On the other, it served a Nazi propaganda machine eager to portray a moderate face to the world.
More about: Arts & Culture, German Jewry, Holocaust, Music, Nazism