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Two Native Sons, Both Enlightened
The Kurt Weill Centre, top, documents the life of the great composer, above left. At right is “Haskalah” pioneer Moses Mendelssohn, another Dessau native. TOP CREDIT: Courtesy of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, New York. by Gabe Levenson And he shows them, pearly white; Just a jack-knife has MacHeath, dear, And he keeps it out of sight.” ‘Mack the Knife,” quoted here, is the opening, and unforgettable ballad of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s smash-hit play “Three Penny Opera,” which opened on Broadway in 1958. Based on John Gay’s 18th-century century comic opera, “The Beggar’s Opera,” the Weill-Brecht masterpiece satirized the 1920s and the decadence of Germany’s Weimar Republic, just as Gay had poked fun at the Establishment 200 years earlier. At the Kurt Weill Centre in Dessau, Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya sings (or growls) in a cigarette-coarsened contralto the 
“We,” a group of six American Jewish journalists, are in Dessau, and we have stopped here to pay tribute to two of Dessau’s greatest Jews — Moses Mendelssohn, on whom Gotthold Lessing’s play “Nathan the Wise” (which was just staged in New York) is based, and Weill. Much of Dessau, with a population of 80,000 today, is only now recovering from what was, in effect, a concrete, Stalinist wasteland. Many visitors have been hard pressed to find the historic structures of the Old City amid the stone blocks that replaced the elegant pre-World War II villas that stood along the tree-lined streets. During the few years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1932), until Hitler seized power in 1933, Dessau was the center of Bauhaus, probably the most significant movement in design and in architecture of the 20th century. The Nazis quickly closed down the Bauhaus School of Design as a breeding-ground of “Jewish Bolshevism.” When the Red Army took over after the war, Dessau, much of which was destroyed in Allied bombing raids, was rebuilt as a major industrial center for East Germany. Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, the Bauhaus has again been in operation, and many of Dessau’s historic buildings have been restored. Today, there is an annual Weill Festival, which includes performances by present-day jazz musicians from Europe and the United States (it ran this year from Feb. 27-March 8). An exhibition in conjunction with the festival features the stage drawings of the influential stage designer Caspar Neher, who created the sets for Weill and his collaborator, librettist Brecht, throughout the 1920s. The show, which runs through March 29, contains Neher’s drawings for the original set of “Three Penny Opera.” Weill’s youth in Dessau (he was born in 1900) is the subject of the museum that bears his name. It is housed in a one-time private residence that had formerly been the home of Lionel Feininger, a prominent German-Jewish modernist painter and contemporary of Weill. Weill grew up in Sandvorsadt, Dessau’s Jewish ghetto at the time. He became a bar mitzvah at the city’s one synagogue, the Orthodox shul where his father, Albert, had been the cantor. After conservatory studies, he met Lenya and they were married in 1926. A year later, he began a short-lived but rich working partnership with Brecht. In 1935, Weill and Lenya (who administered the Kurt Weill Foundation in New York for decades after his death in 1950) left Europe for New York. There has been a Jewish community in Dessau since the 17th century. It is thriving again, with 900 congregants in a new Dessau Synagogue, which was destroyed during Kristallnacht and rebuilt after German reunification in 1990. The rabbi is Israeli-born Moshe Flammenman; the shul president is Dr. Alexander Wasserman. The Moses Mendelssohn Society Centre, part of the 1920s Walter Gropius estate of Bauhaus houses, pays tribute to the great scholar known as the Jewish Socrates. He is known for translating the Pentateuch from Hebrew into German and for inspiring “Nathan the Wise,” the classic play written by his friend and mentor, Gotthold Lessing. Like Weill, Mendelssohn (who is the grandfather of composer Felix Mendelssohn) had his bar mitzvah in the Dessau synagogue. At age 14, he followed his rabbi, David Fraenkel, when that pillar of the Dessau Jewish community took the pulpit at the larger, also Orthodox, synagogue in Berlin. Mendelssohn spent the rest of his life in that city. Even at an early age, Mendelssohn had established himself as an intellectual prodigy. Not only was he eloquent in an elegant, High German, he was fluent also in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French and English. He soon became a significant figure in Germany’s intellectual society and, more importantly, as the leader of Haskalah (“enlightenment”), the movement to reconstruct traditional Judaism to meet the needs of contemporary, 18th century society. Among his many other accomplishments, was his book “Jerusalem,” which was a defense of his rational approach to divine revelation. He and his wife, Fromet Guggenheim, had 10 children; despite his own ardent defense of Judaism, the next generation of Mendelssohns abandoned his “rational Jewish” beliefs and converted to Christianity. A sign identifies the Society Centre as “Moses Mendelssohn, Great Son of the City.” Within are the offices of the society and, on the ground floor, Mendelssohn’s own library, archives and other materials about him — are open to the general public. Heartily recommended is the four-star Hotel Fuerst Leopold Dessau. It is in the center of town, close to the railroad station and it overlooks a large park. Rates for two start at $110. The hotel has a restaurant and bar, a gym and 200 newly furnished, air-conditioned rooms. Resources: Kurt Weill Centre: www.kurt-weill.de; 011 49 (0) 34 619 595 Kurt Weill Festival: www.kurt-weill.de; 011 49 (0) 1805 564 564 Dessau Synagogue, Kantorstrasse 3, 011 49 340 221 5107 Moses Mendelssohn Society Centre: Mittelring 38, 011 49 (0) 340 65080 Hotel Fuerst Leopold Dessau: www.Steinberger.com/aw/Steinberger_Hotel_Leopold/~qvi/ |
  
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