by AYAZ AMIR
There is this newspaper story in front of me, which everyone must have read, about the rickshaw driver in Lahore driven by poverty and debt to take his own life and that of his two young daughters. A photograph of the family in what must have been good times shows them all reasonably happy. But then something must have happened for darkness to take over and for this tragedy to have unfolded.
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Even as Jews were being transported to death camps across Europe, Furtwangler was conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. There are downloads on YouTube showing him conducting the Ninth Symphony (Beethoven’s) with the Nazi elite in attendance, listening to the music with rapt attention, giant swastika drapes hanging from the walls. Music among the ruins. Bombs falling all around, death on the march, but concert halls, at least some of them, still open.
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