The biography Dachau Song: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper by Paul Cummins has been my companion for two and half years. I tiptoed through this book, reading it intermittently with varying levels of engagement, never actually intending to finish it, but last week that is just what I did. Now the subject of this biography is part of my consciousness, and I have been reflecting on what it is about him that makes him such an object of fascination.
My introduction to the accomplished composer, conductor, educator, and mensch, Herbert Zipper, occurred exactly three years ago when I was accompanying a group of students from my high school on a three-week exchange to Germany. One of our tours was of the Dachau memorial site outside of Munich. Drew Perry, one of our students, had told us he had a great-great-uncle who had been a Dachau concentration camp survivor. This uncle, he told us, had written a song while he was incarcerated there, with the goal of lifting his fellow inmates’ spirits.
As we were on our self-guided tour through the museum at the camp memorial site, I saw Drew gazing at one of the wall panels. When I joined him, he said, “This is the song my uncle wrote.” There it was, “Dachau Lied,” words by Jura Soyfer, music by Herbert Zipper, enlarged to fill a three-foot by nine-foot panel. “I wish I knew how it goes,” Drew added, and that is how it happened that I stood next to this descendant of the Zipper clan, sight-reading this song that uplifted and inspired so many in their darkest days.
When we returned to the States, Drew’s mother saw how taken I was with this experience and generously lent me this biography, which is now out of print. At first, the going was slow, in part because the subject was so alien to me. Herbert Zipper grew up part of a privileged, elite class in Vienna a hundred years ago. He had time, leisure, and money to study classical music and explore the cutting-edge intellectual ideas of his time. He was entitled to all good things during a time when my ancestors up the river were scrambling to survive, peasants who lived on the other side of the wall from the animals in order to stay warm in the winter.
However, Hitler’s rise to power changed everything for the Jews at that time, which included Herbert Zipper's family. Early on, Herbert used his musical skills to produce theatre of protest against the new fascist regime in Austria. He organized and led groups of performers in the creation of musical satire to subvert government oppression. Thus began the transformation of a musical career that began within an expansive gift and found fruition in purposeful performance. From this point on in his life, Zipper’s musical expression was fulfilled not only as a form of self-expression, but as a means of uplifting and strengthening the human spirit in all circumstances, no matter how bleak.
When in Dachau concentration camp, one evening Zipper spontaneously began reciting Goethe’s Faust, and found himself surrounded by men starved not only for food and rest, but for the humanity of art. These recitations continued night after night, with ever-enlarging audiences. Then the conductor/composer/problem-solver/dreamer came up with the idea of a camp orchestra with instruments secretly built in the camp woodshop. As he spent twelve hours a day pushing wagons laden with rocks, he composed, humming and harmonizing. He organized fifteen-minute long concerts of these compositions weekly in the latrines, where twenty to thirty men at a time could be uplifted by vastness of art in the world of their shrinking humanity.
Eventually, the poet Jura Soyfer joined Herbert in his duties as camp “horse,” and they were able to talk as they went about their duties. It was Herbert’s idea to use the ironic motto at the camp gate, “Arbeit macht frei,” as the basis for a poem. Jura did just that, and brought his powerful words to Herbert a few days later. Herbert memorized them, and soon returned to Jura with music, which he then taught to the camp orchestra. Jura and Herbert both taught the lyrics, always through oral means, to other prisoners as a way of encouraging them to persevere physically and to combat the intellectually deadening experiences of the concentration camp.
Both Herbert and Jura were transferred from Dachau concentration camp to the camp at Buchenwald within weeks of their song’s creation. Herbert was released from Buchenwald a few months later, ransomed by his family. Jura died at Buchenwald of typhus. Yet the song lived on, becoming an iconic element of resistance within the camps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7UqeeRCGr8&feature=related
Herbert’s life after the camps continued its eventful plot, including a stint as the conductor of the Manila Symphony Orchestra during the final days of WWII when the Japanese invaded and destroyed the city, resulting in Herbert’s incarceration as their prisoner. As an unmitigated survivor, Herbert not only was released, but was instrumental in the reconstruction of the human spirit here as well, conducting concert performances for war-weary GI’s and Filipinos.
Herbert and his wife, his lifelong love and partner, Trudl, immigrated to the United States in 1946, where their efforts enlarged from performance to education. Here Herbert’s influence expanded to promoting the arts through schools and general education, from earliest childhood to adulthood. He died in California in 1997, three days shy of his ninety-third birthday. Herbert Zipper was able to see the documentary about his life nominated for an Academy Award. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113963/combined
Cummins’ book gives us copious details of Herbert’s complicated life, including the dates, locations, and names involved in many, many events. This may be the reason I could not read this book straight through, and yet I may have struck on an even more rewarding experience of the book than a conventional reading of it would have allowed. By spreading out my reading encounters with Herbert’s life story, I was able to absorb the man Herbert Zipper much more as I might have had I known him directly. When we meet a person, we take in small bits of their personality and life story with each encounter, and so I did with Herbert. And I have come to love and admire this old Austrian over time.
I share with Herbert this belief in the expansiveness of the human spirit that flourishes through the arts. When our humanity is attacked, as the concentration camps certainly exemplified, the arts are essential for healing and restoration. Through the promotion of music and the arts, we are all connected to a larger identity of human community that is peaceful, affirming, and joyful. These are the lessons of Herbert Zipper’s life, and the mission that brought him purpose as long as he lived.
By taking on the persistent hopefulness that Herbert's life expressed, I have experienced solace in many sleepless nights when I picked up this book from my bedside book stack. When I lay awake, worried over my personal failings and limitations, or terrified about the vulnerabilities of my dear ones, or obsessed over the threats of my daily existence, Herbert Zipper's quiet commitment to goodness--expressed through music and the arts--consoled me. It is simply music, after all, music that I can lie awake on my pillow in the dark and imagine in my mind, that awakens all that is good and possible within life. My music is words, poetry and prose, which are as simple and infinite as the language of music. These three years of turning the pages of Dachau Song while all the world slept around me have given me a new source of hope and grace within my simpler challenges of living.
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