When the Barbarians Take Over
Uwe Wittstock’s new account of writers considering whether to flee or to remain in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power sheds light on the choices faced by many writers in India and Russia today.
February 1933: The Winter of Literature
by Uwe Wittstock, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles
“It will have become clear to you now,” Joseph Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig in mid-February 1933, “that we are heading for a great catastrophe.” Two weeks previously, on January 30, Germany’s eighty-five-year-old president, Paul von Hindenburg, had appointed as chancellor a man who for more than a decade had spoken and written frankly about his resolve to extirpate democracy and Jews from the country. Roth, who left Berlin the same morning Adolf Hitler came to power and never returned to Germany, was desperate to make his complacent friend recognize the perils before them.
Mozart the Modernist
In his new biography, Peter Mackie conjures a vertiginous version of Mozart as the quintessential artist of the modern world.
By Simon Callow
Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces
by Patrick Mackie
Biographies of composers are a relatively recent genre; those of Mozart were among the first examples.Though his life was not as sensational as that of Gesualdo, for example, who murdered his wife, Mozart was, from his early years, an international celebrity whose very personality posed questions beyond the eternal riddle of creativity. How could a mere child—he started performing publicly on the clavichord at the age of six—be so astoundingly versatile? As he toured Europe, going from court to court and salon to salon with his father, Leopold, and his older sister, Maria Anna—a talented musician as well—the delightful little boy in his nattily embroidered outfits enchanted his listeners, readily obliging them with requests, however crass: now playing with the keys covered, now with only one finger, to delighted applause.
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