What was on Hitler's iPod?

A thick book listed all the records that the Führer owned. There must have been hundreds of them. The wooden panelling of the wall turned out to be a cupboard holding records, with a built-in gramophone that was invisible till the cupboard doors were opened. The black discs stood in long rows, labelled with numbers. Bormann operated the gramophone. Hitler nearly always had the same repertory played: Léhars operettas, songs by Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf and Richard Wagner. The only pop music he would let us play was the 'Donkey serenade'. It usually formed the conclusion of the concert.

'No, my entourage isn't very musical,' Hitler said, resigned. 'When I was still going to official festival performances of opera I usually had to keep an eye on the men with me to see they didn't go to sleep. Hoffman (he meant the press photographer Heinrich Hoffman) once almost fell over the balustrade of the box during Tristan und Isolde, and I had to rouse Schaub and tell him to go over and shake Hoffman awake. Brückner was sitting behind me snoring, it was terrible. (Pliable - this is Wilhelm Brückner, one-time adjutant to Hitler.) But no one went to sleep during the Merry Widow because there was a ballet in it.'


The photographs in this article are from the remarkable Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection. Follow these links for the extraordinary story of this archive, and to view more stunning photos:- * Downfall - and the mystery of Karajan's personal photographer * The mystery of the Siegfried Lauterwasser Collection solved via the internet * How photo archive was salvaged from a trash can *
Also relevant are * The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour * Furtwängler and the forgotten new music * Dresden Requiem for eleven young victims * Holocaust opera's rare performance *
Comments
As thousands die in the Battle of Berlin and countless more are maimed or raped, she writes:
Any moment now we expect the Russians to storm the bunker. All our dogs are dead. The dog-walker has done his duty and shot our beloved pets before they can be torn to pieces up in the park by an enemy grenade or bomb.
And the woman who spent three years as Hitler's private secretary writes of Munich in 1947:
It was wonderful to be living under American democracy. I hadn't realized before that I wasn't hearing music by any Polish or Russian composers, couldn't read Jewish literature ... that so much was banned or taboo. All of a sudden the intellectual world opened up again.
Unbelievable ...
Editor Melissa Muller's contribution gives food for thought, particularly her take on the denazification process that Junge,and all Germans over the age 0f 18, including Furtwängler,Gieseking, Kempff and Karajan (see the Lauterwasser link above),went through:
Denazification was a farce performed for purposes of rehabilitation - a unique attempt to subject the political attitudes of almost an entire population to national cleansing. Most Germans regard this as the end of the affair, and from then on preserve a collective silence about the Nazi period. This is also in the interests of the Allies themselves; Germans are needed as partners in the Cold War in both East and West. Furthermore, German politicians of the Adenauer period are courting the voters - and those politicians who are willing to go along with the demand to draw a final line under the past are more likely to win their favour.
Why do you keep focussing on nazism as a German story?
Germany recovered from that story , many years ago. OK, Austria and my own Flanders didn't. Germany did.It did. Result : much, múch more neo - conservatism ( ultra rifgt wing party influence ) in FR than in GE.
Is it that difficult for the UK?
Prof. Stern : the most profound antagony within the current EU = the one between UK and GE.
Pliable, you were born too old in a much too young world.
This is reflected not just in my articles on these cities, but also in contemporary events across Europe, including the emerging eastern countries of Belarus and the Ukraine, and in contemporary music such as Arvo Pärt's Berliner Messe and Rudolf Mauersberger's Dresdner Requiem.
Fortunately historians and researchers have not stopped studying history because it happened 'many years ago'.
Traudl Junge's book, which this article was taken from, was originally published in Germany ( Bis zur letzem Stunde, Hitlers Sekretarin erzahlt ihr Lenben) in 2002.
And I make no apologies for a forthcoming article based on two new, and valuable, books on the the bombing of Dresden published here in the UK this year. They are Among the Dead Cities by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, and Firestorm, the Bombing of Dresden, 1945, edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang.
That's exactly what I wanted to say. Germany got cured and is still making efforts.
Ever heard - in music - about that sort of things in Austria, Flanders or , yes indeed Norway?