A FINAL final note on that Stockhausen flap
Jun 28th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Let me refer you to this official statement dated September 18th, 2001 - in German, but I assume you can read that - issued by the city-state Hamburg the day after the press conference there that ignited that brouhaha. The night before, only hours after that outrageous utterance, Dr. Christina Weiss, Hamburg’s Senator for Kultur, and her co-worker Benedikt Stampa had an “ausführliches Gespräch” - a detailed discussion - with Stockhausen, which resulted in his own lamely belated apologetic statement that he had “never felt or thought what has been read into my words” - was in meine Worte hineingelegt worden ist.
Read into them?! More attempted smoke-screening and spin-doctoring camouflage. Nobody needed to “read anything into” the words the Norddeutscher Rundfunk’s documentary tape-recording incontestably proved, as if graven in stone - and which Sen. Weiss denounced as “cynical and immoral” - that he had indeed said.
It all boils down to one simple question: did he or did he not say those words?
Damned right he did.
Remember, that the official statement you’re referring to comes 1 week after 9/11. 1 week after 9/11 the Germans were taking out full page ads in the NY Times to proclaim their solidarity with the United States. 1 week after 9/11 we here in NYC were still going to work with the smell of charred bodies and pulverized concrete in the air.
In the immediate wake of the misreporting on Stockhausen’s comments, the town where’s he lived for the past 40 years, Kuerten, withdrew its support of his summer courses. In a matter of days after the mayor’s announcement, he reversed his position after an outpouring of support from fans, students and musicians from around the world.
Like I said earlier, believe what you want to believe, but you’re historicizing a moment of public mania that has a tenuous relationship with the truth.