Page 190 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

The Track of the Jew through the Ages

master their instrument with the greatest bravura, actors play their
roles with great bombast, Jewish theatre directors master the
theatrical technique with a refinement that is hard to beat. But then
again, all these Jewish prodigies, all these virtuosos, have they
become creative artists? They have tried to constrain quality through
quantity and to make art with all the means operating on the senses.
408
Mahler imagined as his ideal a thousand-piece orchestra,
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Reinhardt opened a theatre circus with hundreds and hundreds of
performers. Everything had to be brought forth to overwhelm the
public. At a deeper level then other people worked at their operettas
and "hits", on the edition of sensational novels, and so on ad
infinitum.
One artist I have not yet mentioned and his name may have
gone through the mind of many, Heinrich Heine. 410 Heine was
admittedly one of the cleverest of Jews who, thanks to his
"Hellenistic intellectual orientation", had to be qualified as no other
to do justice to the European soul. But, what I said in general, that it
is the external that alone can be understood and on which alone
emphasis is placed, that becomes clear to us in a symbolical manner
equally in Heine.
Apart from the Buck der Lieder his works may well have
fallen into oblivion, but it would be good to consider them seriously
for once; not to derive pleasure, but to observe how European and
specifically Jewish feeling and thought were reflected in the mind
of a talented Jew, who, born in the joyful Rhineland, absorbed
German fairy-tales and sagas with his mother's milk.
408
[Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was a German Jewish late Romantic musician
whose Eighth Symphony was first performed in Munich as the "Symphony of the
Thousand" on account of its vast instrumental and choral forces.]
409
[Max Reinhardt (ne Maximilian Goldmann) (1 873-1 943) was an Austrian Jewish
theatre director who was very active in Germany and Austria before he was forced
to emigrate to America in 1937. In 191 9 he opened a large theatre in the renovated
Schumann Circus in Berlin which began to be called the Reinhardt Circus.]
4,0
[Heinrich Heine (1 797-1 856) was a German Jewish poet and literary critic many
of whose poems were set to music by Mendelssohn, Schumann and Schubert. In
1 83 1 , after the July Revolution of 1 830, he moved to France, where he, along with
Ludwig Borne, formed the nucleus of the revolutionary literary movement called
"Junges Deutschland" (Young German} ).
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