| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
Editor's Notes |
jules-rothstein@attbi.com
Like many American men, I spend too much time in front of the television set with the remote control. With a satellite or appropriate cable hookup, a lot of things appear on the screen, but you might actually see very little. Often, you drive your wife—who believes that it takes more than a millisecond to judge the worth of a TV program—into fury.
That was what happened at my house last New Year's Eve. As a transplanted New Yorker, I always yearn for a Chicago celebration that can compete with the falling ball of Times Square, so I kept channel surfing. When I arrived at the channel that seems reserved for foreign language broadcasts, I didn't see the usual Italian game show, Spanish soccer game, Indian love story, or Polish variety show. Instead, five men in white tie and tails were singing "Happy Days Are Here Again" in German. The faded picture with the pops of light indicated that the film was old, but there was no caption, and my guests and I could only wonder who conjured up this bizarre concoction of American jazz and Teutonic vocalization. As the song ended, we found out that the singers were called "The Comedy Harmonists," a name we thought to be most fitting.
That might have been the end of it—our laughter as the images flickered then vanished from the screen—but a colleague of mine searched the Internet and learned quite a bit about this group. It turns out they had been a major musical force in Germany during the Weimar Republic, but because half the group was Jewish, they were harassed and then forced to disband after the Nazis rose to power. A Broadway play (Band in Berlin) and a recent German film (The Harmonists) have been produced about them. The film details their ascendancy as entertainers and features their final concert, which took place right before the Jewish members had to flee from Germany.
With the shadow of Nazi horrors in the distance, The Harmonists focuses on people and friendship—on musicians trying to understand their art. The lives of the Harmonists were ripped apart no so much by the Holocaust as by the rising anti-Semitism that laid the groundwork for that murderous conclusion. Their business was a cappella harmony in a disharmonious world.
All members of the group survived the war. Some movie critics believe that because of that and because of their wealth, the Harmonists did not suffer much and, therefore, their story belittles the suffering of those who were forced into concentration camps. God help us if we ever develop a litmus test for suffering! Those of us in health care know that we play a dangerous game when we decide whose suffering should touch our souls. I am not talking about making judgments about resources, but rather about the tendency to think that we know what others have the right to feel.
Although the Harmonists tried again and again to reconstitute their group, neither those who remained in Germany nor those who left for America ever succeeded. It was as though they had lost some magic that could be present only when all of them were together. But the magic was not all that they lost. Like so many people caught in the maelstrom of terrible events, a large part of their lives simply disappeared. They were never allowed to resolve their personal conflicts, and their creative destinies were derailed.
As I write this, the Harmonists are singing in the background, thanks to a CD I ordered via the Internet. They sing in perfect harmony one of their signature songs, "Somewhere in the World." It's a cry for hope that they will find a place in the world where there is perfect happiness. This was a song written early in their career, a song of young people looking, as most young people do, for their own place in the world. Finding your niche is difficult under the best of conditions, let alone with the forces of hate and fear tearing at you.
I think of the flickering images on the screen, and I think not just of the Harmonists being torn apart, but also of the people in the images we see every day on our TV and computer screens: children dying in the streets, victims of suicide bombings, our own soldiers coming home in flag-draped caskets. These very real people will never have the opportunity to find happiness, to live out their destinies, to face down the devils that beset us all. But for most of us, these people are only images that pass quickly by.
How many of our patients pass through our consciousness like images on a screen, without our ever knowing very much about them? Many of those patients lose the chance to experience the phases of life that their peers experience. Like the Harmonists, they might long for a better place and to make their own niche, but they are thwarted by diseases or conditions beyond their control.
It would be impossible to know the pain behind all of the images we see, but there must be something better than what Longfellow wrote: "...on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence."1 I am enriched for having taken the time to learn about the Harmonists, who could just have easily passed me by. They remind me that simply being in this world is not enough. We must pay attention. That is especially true in times of violence, when our young fight a distant war on our behalf—and that is always true as those of us in health care walk daily among patients.
Are we to be, as Longfellow also wrote, "Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness"1? We can choose to pause, to look, to listen—to realize that all around us there are stories for us to learn.
References
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
