Tár, Furtwängler, Complicity
I’ll start off by saying: I adored Tár, have seen it twice and think of it often, but also have no desire to add yet another take to the heap. I will say that the story it tells is very old — a brilliant monster, mad with guilt and seeing ghosts, unwittingly engineers her own inevitable downfall — and I think that treating it as a “cancel culture” movie is a bit like talking about whether Macbeth deserved to be deplatformed. And anyway, I’m a sucker for a downfall story.
Instead, I want to talk about a different, related movie. In one scene in Tár, the title character is having lunch with her venerable predecessor at the Berlin Philharmonic, probing him about whether he’s ever faced any accusations. In response, he brings up the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose legacy was tainted by his association with the Third Reich despite his documented objections to the Nazis and their principles. He characterizes Furtwängler’s treatment at the hands of the de-Nazification effort as unfair, the sad actions of a mob determined to extract justice at any cost, scattershot and misguided in its targets.
The real story is, of course, more complex, and Furtwängler’s case is very different from Lydia Tár’s. This interview with Cate Blanchett in which Gopnik mentions a “beautiful, strange film about Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Third Reich” led me to the film Taking Sides (although I’m not sure if this is the film they mean), based on a play by the Jewish writer Ronald Harwood and available to stream on Amazon Prime.
I forget where I saw it put exactly this way, but something I read once about regime changes — military conquests, coups, and revolutions — is that the people who topple the established order must account for the continued presence of their enemies in the new order. Sure, you’ve taken hold of the levers of power, but lots of the people who used to hold them (and their sympathizers) are still around, and they likely still have resources, connections, and allies. What to do about them? Some new regimes “solve” this problem with bloody purges. The Allies of WWII, wanting to be seen as the just rebuke to the bloodthirsty enemy, chose a less blunt instrument: the de-Nazification effort, which involved (among other things) barring Nazi party members and collaborators from positions of power and prestige, and trying the worst of them for war crimes.
An early scene in Taking Sides, featuring Harvey Keitel as U.S. Major Steve Arnold, establishes the stakes: he has instructions to “get” Wilhelm Furtwängler, the celebrity conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and find him guilty of collaboration. “He represents everything that was rotten in Germany,” says his superior. As a reminder of the moral gravity of his task, he is shown a film clip of a bulldozer pushing a heap of emaciated Holocaust victims into a mass grave. He has two assistants helping him, both with personal reasons to hate the Nazis: a secretary, Emma Straube, whose father was killed in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler, and David Wills, an American Jew who fled Germany as a child and whose parents died in the Holocaust.
However, finding evidence of Furtwängler’s complicity is not so easy, since he took many steps to actively and publicly distance himself from the regime. The talking points from the scene in Tár are all present here: he never joined the party despite enormous pressure to do so, he refused to give the Nazi salute or sign his letters Heil Hitler, he personally helped many Jewish musicians escape Germany, and he opposed and resisted attempts to Aryanize the orchestra and its programming. His distaste for the Nazis was clear, and for many, that would be enough to exonerate him.
But Major Arnold asks a pointed question: why was he permitted these gestures of resistance? The Third Reich was hardly shy about punishing dissenters, so why was Furtwängler seemingly untouchable? The answer, he concludes, is that he was useful to the Nazis, and continued to be useful to them right up to the end. The conductor’s personal feelings, Arnold argues, were irrelevant — his choice to maintain his prestigious position rather than abdicate or leave the country made him as much a servant of the Nazis as the most fervent party member.
In one early sequence, Arnold and his assistants interview various members of the orchestra. All of them, using suspiciously similar language, proclaim their anti-Nazi bona fides, express love and reverence for Furtwängler, and re-tell the same anecdote about how he once used his baton to avoid having to salute Hitler. They can’t all have been brave resistors, thinks Arnold. And he’s right.
Meanwhile, a Soviet official urges Arnold to exonerate the man — not because of his innocence, but because the Soviets want him themselves, for their opera company in East Berlin. This only solidifies the case against him — such was the power of his renown that he couldn’t help but elevate any government he worked for.
The meat of the film is in the dialogue between Arnold and Furtwängler, the former bullying and interrogating, the latter attempting to defend himself. These scenes tilt the balance of sympathy towards the conductor: his interrogator is brutish and cruel, while he appears a broken man, exhausted yet steadfast. He hated the Nazis and resisted compromise at every step, he says, and never strayed from what he saw as his ultimate duty: the defense of art from the malign influence of ideology. He felt he could serve his cause best by staying at his post, and it took all his will just to survive under threats from the Gestapo and constant pressure to comply.
In one scene, Furtwängler arrives with a handwritten statement, a defense of his ideals and values, “so you can understand what kind of man I am.” But he’s not permitted to read it, and at the end of the brutal interrogation he still clings to it, his hand shaking. Arnold’s assistants, Emma and David, are horrified by the scene and moved to speak out in his defense. Emma, in particular, attacks the American position: how can you judge him when you have never had to make such a choice for yourselves? After all, history and our own experience tell us that most people do not possess great moral courage in situations where their survival — or even their good standing with their peers — is at stake.
However, these arguments are not convincing to Arnold. A popular twitter saying holds that if you’re at a table with one Nazi and four other people, then you’re at a table with five Nazis — and Furtwängler was certainly sitting at the table. For Arnold, there’s no seriousness in the idea of “resisting from within” — it’s the within that counts.
Arnold’s coup de grace is the invocation of another conductor: Herbert von Karajan, who was Furtwängler’s rival and professional enemy in Berlin. Furtwängler stayed in Germany, Arnold argues, because of professional vanity: leaving would have meant ceding territory to “little K”, which his pride would not allow. For this charge, the conductor has no defense.
Ultimately, the real Furtwängler was cleared by the de-Nazification committee and permitted to resume his career. But he was not cleared in the opinion of the public, or by many of his peers. When the Chicago Symphony offered him a permanent position, enough prominent musicians vocally objected, including Arturo Toscanini, Vladimir Horowitz, and Arthur Rubinstein, that the orchestra was forced to rescind its offer.
He did have supporters, however, including Yehudi Menuhin, who wrote: “Do not believe that the fact of remaining in one's own country is alone sufficient to condemn a man… remaining at one's post often requires greater courage than running away.”
It’s ironic that Arnold uses von Karajan’s name to get the last word in Taking Sides. Karajan was actually a member of the Nazi party (he actually signed up on two separate occasions) and advanced his career aggressively within the regime. He never, unlike Furtwängler, had any scruples about performing at official party functions. But he still went on to have a brilliant international career after the war, accumulating a vast discography and mountains of prizes. As far as I know, no one in the United States boycotted his tours. He is primarily remembered today as one of the twentieth century’s greatest conductors, not as a man with Nazi ties.
I couldn’t say why this is — perhaps it was because he was much younger, or a shrewder manager of his own image, or because his discography is easier on the modern ear than Furtwängler’s scratchy 1930s recordings. But the fact remains that he was at the table too, and the world willingly forgave and forgot. This is the counterpoint to the old conductor’s lament in Tár. People of faith used to be able to console themselves that even if human justice was messy, divine justice was inexorable and perfect. But for the rest of us, messy human justice is all we have.