Music Behind Barbed Wire - II

I'm continuing to read the book Musik hinter Stacheldraht (Music Behind Barbed Wire) - a vivid and highly readable account of life in a British internment camp during World War 2, written by the Austrian composer Hans Gál (1890-1987). It's a sobering reflection on the attitudes and state of mind of the British public and civil/military authorities of the time (May 1940) that refugees from Nazism, mostly Jewish, were rounded up in the U.K. and interned together with so-called Auslandslandeutschen (expatriate Germans, most of whom were ethnic German Nazis. War hysteria must have played some part in the decision to do this - newspapers like the Daily Sketch ran a heated campaign against "enemy aliens" and "fifth columnists", arguing that all German-speaking persons, regardless of background and orientation, should be rounded up and shipped out of the country. The campaign received support from British politicians, including Winston Churchill. Though the atmosphere created by the outbreak of war and the anxiety about invasion that went with it must have been partly at the root of the problem, it's hard to avoid the suspicion that anti-Semitism was also involved in the decision to mix the persecuted with their persecutors in the way that was chosen.

Gál's day-to-day notes about life in internment camps in Huyton, near Liverpool, and on the Isle of Man, are a clear testimony to what actually transpired in those months of spring and early summer. For the most part he avoids making polemics or political statements (except to express his amazement and horror at the attitudes of some representatives of the British authorities) but instead concentrates on the concrete details of day-to-day life in the camps: the poor food, the overcrowding, the inadequate sleeping arrangements, the prison-like atmosphere in which refugees from tyranny are treated as though they were criminals. There are fascinating glimpses of the intellectual life of a community that include some of the most brilliant figures of Central European artistic and academic life and scholarship, such as Otto Erich Deutsch, Kurt Schwitters, Erwin Stein, Max Born, Ernst Gombrich, Norbert Elias, Alfred Rosenzweig, and many others. As a professional musician and musicologist, Gál sees camp life from a musical perspective, and there are detailed accounts of the attempts to set up a camp orchestra, a process made difficult by the tendency of the camp authorities to confiscate musical instruments as possible sources of danger and subversion.

I'll report further on the book when I have read more of it. I've already listened (on the CD that is included with the volume) to the recording of Gál's Huyton Suite, a work written for the only instruments available in the camp at the time of composition - two violins and a flute. It is music of the most delicate wit and serenity, made all the more remarkable by the nightmarish circumstances in which it came into being, and it is given a beautiful performance by Philippa Davies (flute),together with Paul Barritt and Marcia Crayford (violins).