JEWISH BOOK WEEK
DEFYING TYRANNY
On 20 April 1933, in honour of Adolf Hitler’s 44th birthday, a new play called Schlageter was performed in Berlin. The play is unmemorable and long forgotten, except for a single line of dialogue: “When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my gun.” It is a line that has been variously misattributed to Goering, Goebbels and Himmler – no doubt because it is easy to imagine any one of them casually uttering those grim words.
The Nazis were not the first tyrants – nor, sadly, have they been the last – to ban art, burn books, destroy intellectual life, and commit far worse crimes in the name of cultural cleansing.
What is it about culture that tyrants cannot bear? It may have something to do with Victor Frankl’s observation that, “everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Culture, in other words, is inseparable from freedom and choice — the freedom to think, feel and express things in whichever way each of us chooses.
I remember thinking about this during a remarkable event in Jewish Book Week 2019 (back in those halcyon days when we still took live events for granted). The event brought together the indomitable Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, worldrenowned cellist and survivor of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra, with Niklas Frank, the youngest son of Hans Frank, governor of Nazi-occupied Poland and on whose watch the death camps of Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka operated.
Niklas, who despises everything that his father Hans stood for, told Anita that Hans considered himself to be a “man of culture” and that, at the end of a weary day, he would sit beside his beloved piano, seeking solace as he played the music of Brahms, Beethoven or Schumann.
During questions, an audience member asked Niklas Frank: “how could your father reconcile a love of culture with the barbarity of his daily life?” He replied: “because people like my father thought they had culture, but they were devoid of empathy; and culture without empathy is no culture at all.”
I have had the privilege of running Jewish Book Week for three years now. During that time, I have learned that the festival is about more than a series of events; it is an annual opportunity to come together and celebrate the kind of culture that is fired by empathy.
A great Jewish Book Week event will entertain, but it will also illuminate.
Book Week is more than a series of events: it is a chance to celebrate culture fired by empathy
For a precious hour, we are invited by novelists, thinkers and poets to inhabit their world and experience life through their eyes and ears.
We encounter speakers whose views on a given topic may be profoundly different to our own; we allow ourselves to be irked by them, but we listen, reflect, and perhaps broaden our understanding a little as a result.
These uncertain and sometimes bleak times have driven us all to find new ways to connect to family, friends and community.
This year’s Jewish Book Week is no exception: all our events are online. Our inspiration for the 2021 festival is drawn from the words of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi: “a little bit of light dispels a lot of darkness”.
So please join us to hear any of the hundred great speakers taking part in 50-odd events over nine glorious days in early March. Let’s allow a little bit of light in and dispel the darkness together.
Jewish Book Week runs from Feb 27 to March 7. www.jewishbookweek.com for programme and tickets