The republic that began life
here in the city of Weimar a hundred years ago
was an optimistic one.
A new constitution was created in liberty and justice,
to serve internal and external peace
and to promote social progress.
But it was also a constitution written in unstable times.
The Treaty of Versailles blamed Germany
for everything that occurred between 1914 and 1918.
The demands for reparations were unsustainable, and quickly,
the financial fallout resulted in hyperinflation,
social division, and further political instability.
Eventually, after the political pendulum
had swung back and forth,
a dangerous new era was unleashed.
The change in atmosphere
is quite dramatic around this time.
The National Socialists were not
like old-fashioned right-wing politicians.
They're a little bit more like many populist movements today
because that's not for nothing
that they were called National Socialist.
They were quite socialist in their social policy.
They gave a lot more money to little people,
they built houses, they had the famous VW,
that started off as... it's called the Volkswagen,
the car for the people.
It had a huge program of sending people on holiday,
it made sure the working conditions were okay,
so you know, what's not to like
for people who had nothing before?
They really thought that the Aryans,
as they called them, a human race that does not exist,
were the most valuable and therefore,
by nature, had the right to take everything they needed
to become greater and more powerful.
To annex, to invade, to subdue
whoever was in their way.
The Nazis came to power simply by being elected.
They were the strongest party
in the parliamentary elections of 1933.
Hitler was made Chancellor
in quite an orderly, normal way,
by their then president Hindenburg,
who was also an old field marshal of the German army,
and probably didn't quite understand what he was faced with.
And it happened on a completely legal basis,
at least at the beginning.
There was no coup, there was no bloody revolution,
they were simply elected into power.
When the Nazis came to power,
they had specific goals in mind,
seeking to regain land Germany had lost
after the First World War.
They wanted to restore the country's sovereignty,
but they also wanted to alter its ethnic and social makeup.
Jews were removed from public life,
and the Nazis quickly changed
the country's cultural landscape.
In short, they rejected all the experiments
and the society that had flourished
during the Weimar Republic.
Anything that didn't match the Nazis' skewed ideals
was either banned or burned.
That included piles of books
burned on this square in Berlin, Bebelplatz.
On the 10th of May, 1933,
the works of esteemed Jewish authors
such as Joseph Roth and Sigmund Freud joined
Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front
and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain on that pyre.
Cultural eradication spread quickly.
The Bauhaus was closed,
and modern art and modern music,
particularly that created by Jews,
was mocked in exhibitions entitled Degenerate.
The message was clear.
"While National Socialism brought about
a new version and formulation of European culture,
Bolshevism is the declaration of war
by Jewish-led international subhumans
against culture itself.
It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural.
It means, in the final consequence,
the absolute destruction of all economic,
social, state, cultural,
and civilising advances made by western civilisation,
for the benefit of a ruthless and nomadic
international clique of conspirators,
who had found their representation in Jewry."
These attacks were nothing new,
though they quickly gained in potency.
But despite all this,
many figures wanted to continue creating,
often in defiance, and sometimes to blend in.
But how to do it?
What were the new rules?
How could you have your work published
or performed if you were "degenerate"?
For many composers, that meant returning to the past.
Principally, to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Frankly, I cannot imagine a composer
who would not go back to Bach at some point in their lives.
We all study Bach early on,
counterpoint, harmony, and all that.
We all learn to write chorales in Bach's style.
We all learn how to write fugues,
and then sooner or later, you feel the pull.
There's something universal about it,
something liberating.
For Berg, he chose a very particular Bach chorale,
and I think the reason why he chose that
is the fact that it has got a whole-tone scale
in the beginning, this.
So it suits his compositional ideas.
Berg, in his Violin Concerto,
was already using the 12-tone method
in a way that was closer to tonality
than strict 12-tone music usually was.
So he splits the 12 notes into four triads,
which gives the music a more sort of lyrical overall feel,
and it allows him to use Ländler and waltz tunes
within his strict system.
And then there's the Bach chorale in the second movement
that is also an homage to Manon Gropius,
who was the daughter of Walter Gropius,
the architect, who died in her teens.
The dedication on this closes,
"To the memory of an angel", who was Manon.
Maybe Alban Berg's Violin Concerto was an attempt
to placate those who called his music degenerate,
or would do worse. But Berg died in 1935,
therefore saving himself in some ways
the indignity of the Third Reich.
For others, it was too late.
I'm back where I began my journey,
in Weimar, in the hills above the city,
and I am treading in the footsteps of the great poet Goethe,
who loved to come walking here.
I'm also treading in the footsteps
of another cultural figure,
the Bauhaus student and employee, Franz Ehrlich.
He was a graphic designer, a typographer,
and had been commissioned to create a gate
for a complex of buildings situated in these beech woods,
which in German, is Buchenwald.
Franz Ehrlich was creating a gate
for the Nazi concentration camp here,
where he'd been sent as a prisoner in 1937
because of his communist leanings.
Two years later, he was released,
and survived long after the Second World War,
having worked under both the Third Reich
and in East Germany.
Ironically, his training at the Bauhaus saved his life.
"Jedem das Seine",
"To each what he deserves".
It's a phrase that appears throughout German history.
Johann Sebastian Bach,
Alban Berg's inspiration for his Violin Concerto,
set the words to music,
and you can find them in the works of Martin Luther.
But at Buchenwald, they represent something different.
This was a singular sign,
quite unlike the false promise of
"Arbeit Macht Frei",
"Work makes you free",
that appeared in the majority of concentration camps
and death camps in the Nazi Reich.
And again, unlike many of those,
this chilling sign was to be read from inside the camp.
It told the prisoners, Jews, Poles,
the mentally ill, the physically disabled,
political inmates, Roma, Freemasons, homosexuals,
that they had got what they deserved.
The 12-year regime that sought to destroy those people,
the regime that ran this appalling camp,
is thankfully long gone.
But the 14-year Weimar Republic
represented by the people imprisoned here, lives on.
Because for all the horror that this gate represents,
I can't help but feel it was also an act of defiance.
After all, it's spelled out in a font
that the Nazis would otherwise have deemed degenerate,
given its roots in the Bauhaus' splendid,
utopian, socialist project.
And maybe that's what Franz Ehrlich,
a committed communist, had in mind.
Today, for me, this sign speaks of the fortitude of Weimar culture.
The films, theatre, cabaret, literature,
paintings, photography, design, architecture,
and of course, the music celebrated
in the Philharmonia Orchestra series
Weimar Berlin: Bittersweet Metropolis.
Some of the exponents of that culture
were lucky enough to escape the Nazis
and reach kinder shores,
creating the pounding rhythms of Broadway,
and the glamour of Hollywood's silver screen.
Others were not so lucky,
but their spirit lives on, too,
in our own vibrant, multicultural society,
as well as in the art created before Germany was hijacked by Hitlerite brutes.
"Jedem das Seine".
"To each what he deserves".
To a fascist regime, a history of shame.
To cultural endeavors celebrating the human spirit,
centuries of appreciation.