Modern Response
Many decades later, association with the Kristallnacht anniversary was cited as the main reason against choosing 9 November ("Schicksalstag"), the day the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, as the new German national holiday; a different day was chosen (3 October 1990, German reunification).
Avant-garde guitarist Gary Lucas's 1988 composition "Verklärte Kristallnacht", which juxtaposes the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikvah", with phrases from "Deutschland Über Alles" amid wild electronic shrieks and noise, is intended to be a sonic representation of the horrors of Kristallnacht. It was premiered at the 1988 Berlin Jazz Festival and received rave reviews. (The title is a reference to Arnold Schoenberg's 1899 work "Verklärte Nacht" that presaged his pioneering work on atonal music; Schoenberg was an Austrian Jew exiled by the Nazis). Kristallnacht was also the inspiration for the 1993 album Kristallnacht by avant-garde composer John Zorn.
The German power metal band Masterplan's debut album, Masterplan (2003), features an anti-Nazism song entitled "Crystal Night" as the fourth track. The German band BAP published a song titled Kristallnaach in their Cologne dialect, dealing with the emotions of the Kristallnacht.
Read more about this topic: Kristallnacht
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or response:
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.”
—Julie Burchill (b. 1960)