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What in the name of all my erstwhile fellow Americans have always held dear has become of the country where I spent the first uninterrupted twenty-five of my meanwhile eighty-three years?  What more has to happen to get it across to Mr. & Mrs. Lunchbucket (to quote a CBS News editor who used to record my reports from Berlin) that post-9/11 measures in the Bush-Cheney USA more and more resemble the events that led up to Adolf Hitler’s becoming Germany’s Chancellor and perverting an entire highly civilised nation into the most flagitiously criminal fascist regime in modern history?

The salon article I wish every American who genuinely loves his country could read begins with this factual self-introduction by its author:

My name is Malcolm Wrightson Nance.  I am a former member of the U.S. military intelligence community, a retired U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer.  I have served honorably for twenty years.

While serving my nation, I had the honor to be accepted for duty as an instructor at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school in North Island Naval Air Station, California. I served in that capacity as an instructor and Master Training Specialist in the Wartime Prisoner-of-War, Peacetime Hostile Government Detainee and Terrorist Hostage survival programs.

At SERE, one of my most serious responsibilities was to employ, supervise, or witness dramatic and highly kinetic coercive interrogation methods, through hands-on, live demonstrations in a simulated captive environment which inoculated our student to the experience of high intensity stress and duress.

Some of these coercive physical techniques have been identified in the media as Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.  The most severe of those employed by SERE was waterboarding….

For a photograph of this retired but notably spruce U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer, in the uniform he at least once wore with such manifest pride, plus his unabridged whistle-blowing exposé of torture as officially condoned by the Bush-Cheney United States of America, click here.

On October 8th, a New York Times article under James R. Oestreich’s byline led off with this:

“Opening the Carnegie Hall season, the [Lucerne Festival Orchestra] had come to New York as an exclusive creature of Claudio Abbado, but a seriously ill Mr. Abbado had to stay behind….”

Yeah, sure…. 

Experienced practitioners of journalism instinctively recognize at least two kinds of illness, one of them “diplomatic” – i.e., their promulgators knowingly lie in their teeth, for various reasons, paramount among them legal: cancellations invariably mean emergency additional expenses, so contracts customarily include an escape clause excusing such “acts of God” as serious illness – and my own personal physician (also Abbado’s during his tenure as conductor of Berlin’s mighty Philharmonic), who ordinarily maintains total confidentiality, once confirmed for me the medical feasibility of widely published reports that Abbado’s emergency operation for stomach cancer had left him with literally no stomach whatever, with a stretch of mere intestine skilfully pressed into duty as an emergency substitute, forcing Abbado at least for a period of adjustment to subsist on tiny feedings at accelerated intervals.  Abbado canceled this Carnegie Hall obligation, the press reported, because of illness – which especially under his circumstances hardly surprised anyone.

Earlier this week, empathetically outraged by the treatment accorded the same unboundedly esteemed physician friend, I privately broadcast that outrage to a few personal friends it affected at least peripherally, and one of them who responded I sincerely regret I must leave anonymous here.  I’ll also, for reasons of auxiliary camouflage, edit his personal communication to me, which with European courtesy he wrote me in his rather picturesque acquired English.

Anyone in his right mind has to understand that 9/11 radically changed a long list of things, high among them airport security.  Months ago, bound from Berlin’s Tegel Airport for Helsinki, I had in my leather handbag a tiny keepsake gift less than two inches in overall length: probably the tiniest Swiss Army knife in history, containing one itty-bitty blade, a similar (almost useless) nail-file, and, in lateral slots, itty-bitty tweezers and an incongruously elegant toothpick made of apparently genuine ivory – end of inventory.

However, for the punctilious German official who examined me (and I can recall only one such physical once-over even more thorough than this: at the airport in Tel-Aviv, where the young Israeli soldier going over my person skilfully kept up a line of chatter obviously intended to distract me from such momentary intimacies as his making certain I had absolutely nothing taped between my legs or above my penis) had me open and empty every nook and cranny of that handbag – and he took inexorable exception to my cute little knife.  To his way of thinking – which I totally understand and approve – knife meant knife, and some of those Al-Qaida villains who mass-murdered all those airline passengers on 9/11 had managed to commit that unprecedented crime armed with nothing apparently more sinister than the sort of harmless-looking cutter used on plain ordinary household carpeting.  (In passing, the back of my hand to Finnair’s Tegel Airport staff: not only did they manage to lose that gift knife, not only useful but also cherished for sentimental reasons, but when I pressed them after my return to track it down, an egregiously rude German employee there simply brushed me completely off.)

Getting back to Claudio Abbado’s cancellation of his Carnegie Hall date – and every musician and musical organization naturally accords any Carnegie Hall date pinnacle importance – here you have the explanation provided by a trusted, totally reliable person definitely in a position to know for sure but whom I must, unfortunately, leave anonymous here. 

Apparently in connection with Lucerne’s location in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Abbado evidently had to go – for the personal interview inflexibly demanded of all such post-9/11 visa applicants – to the Embassy of the United States of America in Bern, the Swiss capital.  The totally reliable and trusted musician friend of mine who’s blown this particular whistle sums up what he reliably (and in my opinion justifiably) regards as Abbado’s real reason for canceling in these few unequivocal words:

“His visit to the U.S. Embassy in Bern.”

He writes from repeated personal experience as a rising musical star already with plenty of experience with major orchestras on several continents when he goes on:

“Everyone who at least once has gone through this procedure knows what it looks like: lines, waiting-list, checking of your files, fingerprints, SPECIAL (!) photos [and I have to admit I have no idea of what he means by "SPECIAL (!)"], another line (inside), discussion with the person behind a glass wall, with you standing and her (him) comfortably sitting, etc., etc.  Why should Maestro Claudio Abbado go through all that hell?”

Let my European friend round off his own contribution with this personal opinion of what he calls the good news:

“Maestro Abbado feels good – and the bad news is: American music fans didn’t get a chance this time to see him conducting his excellent orchestra.  And I am afraid  he’s not the first and not the last European musician who will cancel their U.S. appearances because of  new U.S. visa-regulations.”

Prior to composing this bloggery, I sought opinions from several informed colleagues and friends.  Another response, from the distinguished retired editor of an impressive list of major American musical publications: “As if I weren’t already ashamed enough these days to be an American.”

And from a fellow Berliner-by-choice, with pre-unification experience of Soviet-dominated eastern Europe: “I know of many people who will not even take a plane which stops over in the U.S. nowadays, because non-citizens are treated in such a demeaning manner.  It’s a bit like the procedures behind the old Iron Curtain nowadays, although even before 2001 it was hardly cordial.  How sad.”

For understandable pragmatic reasons, all kinds of people, in various categories and for various reasons, regard this particular potato as far too hot to handle.  Any and every foreign orchestra allots top priority to any American gig, and none of the orchestral officials I approached would talk to me about this.  Thanks entirely to adventitious geography, our Berlin Philharmoniker (who’ll play four Carnegie Hall concerts later this month) at least have it comparatively easy, thanks to the U.S. Embassy’s location here in the capital: their Leipzig colleagues in the great old Gewandhausorchester, for instance, before any such American tour have to make a special trip all the way over to Frankfurt to make nice in person for the people in charge of the Consulate there.

The originally military abbreviation V.I.P. (for “very important person”) has long since become virtual Esperanto, and also a pragmatic aspect of international diplomacy.  Can you imagine any even moderately important official of any foreign equivalent of, for example, The National Association of Manufacturers ever getting subjected to such indignity in order to obtain an American visa? 

I certainly can’t. 

Can anyone seriously wonder why so many Europeans tend to echo the expression a German visitor whipped me with during my years as a San Franciscan?  He summarized his overall opinion after a considerable swing through the country’s most important capitals in the term Kulturlosigkeit – lack of what that catch-all German noun Kultur includes.

Years ago, the wife of a Berlin-based State Department official stoutly proclaimed to me that “An American passport is a privilege!”  She seemed sincerely taken aback when I told her that every other democratic country I know even of regards its passport as automatically an identification document for all its citizens.

During my earlier more or less annual returns to my original homeland, it invariably abashed and shamed me to behold one particular bit of peculiarly American arrogance rise up by way of welcome and slap smack in the face every poor second-class mere foreigner by way of greeting: two parallel waiting lines for arriving travelers, one for the manifestly privileged American nationals, the other – always much longer, always moving much more slowly – for those poor second-class mere foreigners.

Such aspects of my present-day original homeland obviously had a direct bearing on my becoming a naturalized citizen last month of today’s truly democratic Federal Republic of Germany, automatically in proud possession of its Personalausweis (identification card) plus its passport additionally proclaiming me a citizen of the European Union that includes Germany.

Germany’s radical, even revolutionary “student movement” during the late 1960s totally dumped – forever, let’s hope – the long traditional stiff-necked authoritarian German methods of child-rearing that gave the world, among other calamities, Adolf Hitler and his unprecedentedly murderous Third Reich.  At that time, during the 1960s, revolutionary trends among those wonderfully courageous students sometimes swung a bit far in the opposite direction, but one lone book changed German attitudes towards education in a totally benevolent way: Summerhill, by England’s maverick educator A. S. Neill.  He’d adopted as his own personal guru Sigmund Freud’s most radical disciple Wilhelm Reich, the title of one of whose books will tell you a good deal about that (quite literally) mad genius: The Function of the Orgasm.  Under Reich’s dominant influence, Neill founded in England an unprecedented school for children who’d proven such behavior problems that their parents, finally at their wits’ ends, had literally no place else to send them for schooling that would even touch them with a bargepole.  One basic sentence suffices to sum up the sole rule Neill imposed upon his nippers: total – and I do mean total – freedom, as long as that unbridled freedom didn’t violate the rights of others.

One salutary offshoot of those yeasty days here in the 1960s’ Berlin (which fell well within my own first quarter-century sojourn here, from 1956 to 1981) took the form of what became known as the Kinderladen – literally “children shop”: parents sufficiently interested in shielding their kids from those horribly destructive traditional authoritarian methods joined together in groups and simply rented cheap empty storefronts (to use the American term), and in them housed newly created private kindergartens, with carefully selected teachers who shared their views about teaching during those early formative childhood years – in turn an echo of one of Freud’s primary fundamentals of psychoanalysis, which recognises the first six or so formative years of a young human’s life as uniquely important for what that human will then in time develop into.

My apartment building in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf borough has had such a Kinderladen nextdoor since before I moved into it immediately after returning to Berlin twelve years ago.  One little boy there attracted my psychologically educated attention the first time I saw him: pallid complexion, dead eyes, withdrawn manner – he immediately evoked my limited experience with that still puzzling psychological phenomenon called autism.  From time to time, when my Dachshund boss Maxe walks me, I pause for brief conversations with the two young women in charge of the place, and when I asked one of them about this obviously far from happy little boy, it came as no surprise when she told me: “Er ist Autist.“

Returning with Maxe from our first walk this morning, I saw ahead of us, on the stretch of sidewalk in front of my building and the Kinderladen, those two women’s considerably younger new assistant, whom I’d noticed a few days earlier because of his clearly harmonious relationship with a group of the kids coming back from the spacious playground in the aptly named Volkspark – People’s Park – a short walk away.  This morning, as I approached, I could barely believe my eyes to behold that autistic little boy actually smiling – something I’d never before seen him do.  That behavior had an obvious reason: that young assistant had taken him – and him alone – out to play with him, on a tricycle on our stretch of sidewalk.  That sight so gladdened my heart that I spoke to him and complimented him on his clearly manifest expertise in dealing with all those kids.

The day, which had begun with unseasonably sunny weather, seemed to cry out for me to make the most of one of our last fair days before the temperature will force me to caparison myself with such things as gloves, so since Maxe’s exceptionally attenuated spine (his first X-ray revealed that Maxe – the world’s champion dog by anyone’s genuinely disinterested, truly objective standard, has one more vertebra than nature intended for even a Dachshund to have) precludes his making longer walks than necessary, I set out alone.

Crossing the Bundesallee (the pre-war Kaiserallee) on the overhead footbridge, I first came upon the spacious enclosure where dog-owners have official permission to let their mutts run free, and I paused for a few minutes of fond regret.  When Maxe took charge of my life about twelve years ago, I tried taking him there every afternoon to let him wear himself out by trying desperately, on those truncated legs of his, to keep pace with longer-legged dogs, but he soon proved, to the surprise of no one with the least experience of this most headstrong of canine breeds, so anarchic that in order to re-leash him, when time came to go home, I had to enlist one or more strangers to help me corner and overwhelm my recalcitrantly headstrong mutt.

Continuing on my way eastward this morning, I passed another spacious enclosure, this one for young bipeds.  Does anyone reading this recall Cat Stevens’ poignant song about modern city life “But Where Do the Children Play?”  My beloved Berlin has certainly long since answered that vitally important question – in every neighborhood of this huge city, twenty-five miles across at its widest diameter – once and for all.

At the easternmost end of my walk I came to the building that had once, soon after World War II ended in 1945, housed what every German at that time knew as RIAS, the acronym for Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor – Radio in the American Sector of that era’s four-power city ruled over by the victorious Allies: Britain, France, the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, and the USA.  RIAS (pronounced REE-ahss) became one of the most implacably persistent thorns in the Soviet authorities’ Communist sides, and it remained that until 1989 brought Germany’s reunification and RIAS got absorbed into today’s RBB, Rundfunk (literally circular spark, a term that also includes television) in Berlin and Brandenburg, the federal state that completely surrounds the city-state Berlin.

When Maxe got me home, one of the two ladies in charge of the Kinderladen happened to tarry outside its entrance, and I seized the occasion to zing in a good word for their young new assistant Johannes.  I told her that his noticeably excellent wave-length with his young charges, in particular with that little autist, had made it a surprise when he told me he’d studied foreign languages but had no actual specific training as a Kindergärtner.  “No,” she said, “he’s only twenty-eight and he’s going this job as his” – here she used an abbreviation new to me, something I recall as Zivi (pronounced Tzee-vee), obviously short for Zivildienst, a catch-all term for various kinds of public service available to all young Germans as an alternative to going into uniform as legally required by my adopted country’s “universal” military service.  How wonderfully sensible, I couldn’t help thinking, that such young Germans today (another of them: a newly married young physician I’d first photographed, the son of friends, at the age of less than twenty-four hours, who with his lovely fellow-physician pregnant wife had graced the party given for me a month or so ago to celebrate my naturalization) have available this possibility to serve today’s Germany – my Germany – truly pro bono publico.

And then several hours ago, what should fall into my lap but yet another story, this time actual news, of the kind I especially enjoy distributing for two reasons: it seems to me characteristic, even typical, of the Germany I so sincerely and gratefully love, and because its kind of story about my own today’s Germany so often simply remains unknown abroad.  Instead of my even partially summarizing it for you, I’ve instead made it available in its entirety to anyone reading this bloggery who can work up the energy merely to click here.

The lead paragraph from Brian Ladd’s thoughtful and thought-provoking review:

“Democracy is a fragile flower, as we learn again and again.  Among the many failed democracies of the past century, few held more promise than Germany’s Weimar Republic, and none collapsed into greater horror.  Its story can be told in two ways: as a drama of decadent excess and tragic flaws, or as an elegy recalling noble promises betrayed by treacherous enemies.  Eric D.  Weitz’s Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy falls squarely into the second category….”

Let me extract a few other nuggets from Prof. Weitz’s book (just published by the distinguished Princeton University Press) that appeal in particular to me personally as a newly naturalized citizen of this country, which has given me so much and which I’ve come to love so sincerely.  Let me emphasize right now that anyone who’s ever known me knows that I in no way ever attempt to exculpate Nazi Germany’s uniquely criminal record; I do however go along – at least in principle – with the famous dictum attributed (whether rightly or wrongly) to Mme de Staël: “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.”

Now for those tidbits from this book review:

“Weitz, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, praises the republic’s achievements and condemns its murderers: the right-wing businessmen, army officers and civil servants who handed the country over to the Nazis….”

He goes into Germany’s post-1918 “incomplete revolution that created a model democracy but left it to be administered and defended by its enemies; the frightening 1923 hyperinflation that shattered middle-class trust in the government; and the fragile stability that lasted until the United States stock market crash of 1929 triggered the cancellation of American loans, a financial crisis, mass unemployment and dictatorship….

“Among the republic’s political and economic achievements were an eight-hour day, unemployment insurance and firm constitutional guarantees of liberty.  More famous and controversial was Weimar culture, and Weitz devotes much of his book to some favored highlights….

“The rapid industrialization and urbanization of perhaps the world’s most culturally and scientifically literate society was followed by the blossoming of liberty after the horrors of war.  All this gave Weimar a sense of both possibility and crisis, spurring great minds to extraordinary creativity, whether in traditional forms — Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy — or in new genres shaped by modern technology and politics — the architecture of Bruno Taut and Erich Mendelsohn, László Moholy-Nagy’s photography, Hannah Höch’s photomontages, Brecht and Weill’s revolutionary operas….”

I’ve made Brian Ladd’s entire New York Times review available to anyone who merely clicks here.

If you haven’t yet discovered it, I heartily recommend it to you, and in my wonted great-hearted way I’ve arranged you to have at it simply by clicking here.

As the current season began, the Deutches Symphonie-Orchester plastered Berlin with posters brandishing its new conductor Ingo Metzmacher and this season’s motto, which galvanized me: “Von deutscher Seele” – approximately “Of the German soul.”  The word Deutsch remains, to use a psychoanalytic term, intensely cathected, charged with myriad associations downright neuralgic to pro-democratic Germans.  To me that phrase signifies a major Pfitzner work I knew only about, a huge choral score for soloists, chorus, and orchestra.  Metzmacher would devote the DSO’s first concert in the Philharmonie this season to it – and, meaningfully, on the national holiday called Day of German Unity.

I emailed my own apprehensive reaction to several personal contacts in the DSO’s administration – which remains unanswered.  Clearly Metzmacher anticipated other allergic responses, for before the concert the weekly newspaper Die Zeit devoted exceptional space to an exhaustive interview conducted by Claus Spahn, whose first question cornered Metzmacher: “Why this ‘quest for the German soul?’”  Metzmacher’s response boils down to his personal quest for the essence of German: “Where do I come from?  Where lie my roots as a musician?”  – questions, he said, that have long preoccupied him.

So far, so good …  but why, I myself ask, specifically Pfitzner?  His music does have a few fans, but on exclusively musical grounds they do not include me.  He has left a thoroughly documented reputation as an anti-Semite – but as Manuel Krug’s review for Die Welt points out, that applies also to Chopin and Wagner, to name only two racist bigots whose music gets widely performed.  During a pre-concert discourse between the DSO’s Intendant Ernst Elitz and the prominent Social Democrat leader Egon Bahr, Willy Brandt’s right hand during Brandt’s chancellorship, I learned the most revolting bit yet about Pfitzner to come to my attention.

Politically thinking music-lovers have difficulty with the fact that some of even the most villainous Nazis sincerely loved music.  Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (whose murder by partisans brought the savage eradication of the village Lidice and its entire population, regardless of age) loved to play the violin, which he reportedly did quite well.  Hans Frank, the butcher of Kraków in occupied Poland, cultivated personal friendships with a number of top-echelon German musicians – among them Hans Pfitzner.

Now brace yourself for the real shocker.  Translated verbatim from Switzerland’s impeccably neutral Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “As [Frank] in October 1946 already sat in his Nuremberg death cell …  he received a telegram: “Dear friend Frank.  Take this hearty greeting as a sign of solidarity [Verbundenheit] also in a difficult time.  Always yours, Dr.  Hans Pfitzner.”

Musically, this concert (involving three vocal soloists and the Rundfunkchor Berlin) went well – as had another a few days earlier, which had combined powerful performances of Richard Strauss’s autobiographical tone poem “Ein Heldenleben” and Edgar Varèse’s still prickly “Amériques.”  The DSO can rejoice in a brilliant successor to Kent Nagano.

Metzmacher’s disingenuous Pfitzner sally promptly brought him an accusation of “provocation” from Germany’s Central Council of Jews.  Naturally he rejected that: “Pfitzner’s anti-Semitic utterances are inexcusable.  At no time did I have the intention to distract from that.”  He called Pfitzner’s 1921 cantata “a document of the time long before National Socialism” and the Day of German Unity an occasion “on which we remember our so varied [wechselvolle] history….  In that context came my decision to play Hans Pfitzner’s music on that day.  Not to whitewash it, not to celebrate it, but to offer it for discussion.”

Okay, done.  But in view of its mediocre quality as predominantly assayed – especially in comparison with so many other far more meritorious works performed far too infrequently – one wonders whether, ex post facto, he would still regard that decision as justifiable.

On an Internet-age impulse this morning, I yielded to the impetus sparked by Frank Rich’s Op-Ed contribution in today’s New York Times and submitted the two-word phrase “good Germans” to www.Google.com – which in an eye’s merest twinkling knocked me flat with “about 66,300″ hits on that term – all of which you can wade your own way through by clicking here. 

I cordially recommend that to any historically minded visitor interested in comparing those sincerely good – but passive – Germans with all the similarly intentionally good Americans now, in frighteningly similar fashion, passively accepting the present administration’s chipping away at the very foundations of the historic American tradition of democracy that became the envy of much of the world due to a brilliant Constitution that marked a change in all world history.

But since Frank Rich’s column this morning galvanized me to the extent it did – especially since I proudly claim ownership of an opulent certificate from the administration of the city-state of Berlin (which I’ve made arrangements to have suitably framed for hanging in a prominent place in my Berlin apartment), dated August 16th, 2007, proclaiming me a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany – let’s concentrate for the moment on Frank Rich’s column.

He immediately clobbers us with this sledgehammer lead: “‘Bush lies’ doesn’t cut it anymore.  It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.”

Got that now?  Rich continues:

“Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing [sic!] torture.  President Bush gave his standard response: ‘This government does not torture people.’  Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of ‘torture’ is.  The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.

“By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago.  As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques have a grotesque provenance: ‘Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’  It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions, and long-time sleep deprivation.” 

For those insufficiently versed in modern German history, GeStaPo abbreviates Geheime Staatspolizei, one of Hitler’s two most effective instruments of terror (the other: the SS, which among other accomplishments ran Nazi Germany’s vast multi-national ramification of concentration and extermination camps) which, thanks to previous organization exemplifying the phrase “German efficiency”, had Germany figuratively but paralytically by the balls within mere days after his appointment to the Chancellorship by the aristocratic, hysterically anti-Socialist President Paul von Hindenburg.   

But since I’ve made Frank Rich’s entire column easily available to anyone who simply clicks here, let me turn you over to the courageous author of this powerhouse piece of top-quality journalism.