Ginsberg, Holocaust survivor with heavy metal coda, dies at 99
Inge Ginsberg, who fled the Holocaust, helped U.S. spies in Switzerland during World War II, wrote songs in Hollywood and, in a final assertion of her presence on Earth, made a foray into heavy metal music as a nonagenarian, died July 20 in a care home in Zurich. She was 99.
The cause was heart failure, said Pedro da Silva, a friend and bandmate.
Ginsberg lived in New York City, Switzerland, Israel and Ecuador. She wrote songs and poetry, worked as a journalist and refused to fade into the background as she aged, launching herself, improbably, into her heavy metal career. She was the frontwoman for the band Inge and the Tritone Kings, which competed on television in “Switzerland’s Got
Talent,” entered the Eurovision Song Contest and made music videos. Whatever the venue, Ginsberg would appear in long gowns and pearls and flash the two-fingered hand signal for “rock on” as she sang about the Holocaust, climate change, mental health and other issues.
In the 2017 music video for the band’s song “I’m Still Here,” Ginsberg stands in front of a screen showing filmed images of refugees. She sings — in a manner reminiscent of spokenword poetry — about her grandmother and four
young cousins, all of whom were killed in German camps. At the end, she slices the screen and walks through it, singing as she joins the other band members amid a roar of electric guitars, drums and a pounded piano.
“All my life, I fought for freedom and peace,” she sings. In the last chorus, Ginsberg, who was in her 90s at the time, screams, “I’m still here!”
The band grew out of a friendship between Ginsberg and Lucia Caruso; they had met in the audience of a concert in 2003 at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. Caruso, a student, was watching the performance of a doctoral composition by her boyfriend, da Silva. The couple married, went on to performing and teaching careers in classical music and stayed close to Ginsberg.
One day in 2014, Ginsberg read out loud to da Silva the words of a children’s song she was writing. “She wrote these lyrics about worms eating your flesh after you die,” da Silva said. That had the ring of heavy metal to him, and he suggested building a band around her.
A short documentary video in 2018 for The New York Times Opinion section by filmmaker Leah Galant recounted Ginsberg’s story. It shows scenes of her performing on “Switzerland’s Got Talent” and auditioning to appear on the NBC show “America’s Got Talent.” She said she wanted to prove through her performing that elderly people could still contribute to society. “In American and even European culture, the old people are excluded from life,” Ginsberg said in the documentary. “You have to have the chance to be heard.”
Galant said in an interview, “We felt energized by her as much she felt energized by us.”