November 11, 2007
Max Raabe Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:45 PM EST New York’s Carnegie Hall has organized a festival celebrating Berlin. It is called “Berlin In Lights,” and it opened last week with a concert by a German musician named Max Raabe, who led a dozen other musicians in a band called the Palast Orchester. You can get an idea of what Raabe is like in concert by forking over $267 for a DVD of a live performance, Max Raabe & Palast Orchester: Dance & Film Music of 1920s, and while I have never seen this DVD—until that concert kicking off “Berlin In Lights” I had neithr seen nor heard Max Raabe—I have now sent off for it. You also see footage of their acts on YouTube, or listen to the music on CDs. German friends had raved about Raabe, and now I know why. The material he plays and sings, dance band and other popular music of the 1920s and early 1930s, is witty and charming, sometimes remarkably so, and Raabe’s delivery of his introductions to the music is very droll, very dry, and generally delightful. If you are German, it also seems to have astonishing poignancy. Raabe and the music he has revived reminds my German friends that their country’s twentieth century extends past wars and staggering brutalities into the mass and popular cultures of the Weimar Republic, which is to say into a lively, raucous, intelligent, and playful musical culture. Raabe reminds them that they do not live forever and only in the shadow of Hitler. Visiting one of those friends in late July a few years back, I asked about a military parade going past in the distance, and was told that July 20 is the day volunteers for the German army take their oath of allegiance to the German constitution. It is the day German soldiers came closest to assassinating Hitler, and as my friend sadly remarked, “We do not have too many military traditions of which we can be unreservedly proud.” July 20 is one such. That year I had seen Omaha Beach, Bastogne, and a fair number of U.S. military cemeteries, which made my friend’s observation suddenly and simultaneously obvious and disorienting. He thought every people better off with some history it can proudly commemorate, and while this thought does not seem to have made too much headway among all of the dominant schools of academic history in our country, I suspect he was right. He was also the first person I ever heard listening to the Comedian Harmonists, a musical group not too dissimilar to Raabe’s, three of whose Jewish members Hitler chased into exile. My friend needed a usable past, and he had found one, in a less than obvious place. The music Raabe performs includes American music, too, because a number of the German-Jewish composers who escaped the Third Reich made it to Hollywood and Tin Pan Ally, and we know their music, some of it, anyway, as American music. It appears in the scores of Marx Brothers movies and a lot of other places an American audience recognizes without knowing the German origin of the music. Max Raabe made me reflect on the two-way traffic between German and American popular music. Our musicals owe a lot to their operettas, our émigré composers owed as much to the classical training they received in Germany, while German popular music owes a lot to our blues and jazz, some of which we exported only to see it come home, transmuted abroad and then widely diffused via our mass media, by Germans who brought it with them when they fled the Nazis. American culture had been made, and will be continue to be made, by an intricate and subtle set of exchanges.
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