Book Review: The Inextinguishable Symphony

Martin Goldsmith, The Inextinguishable Symphony; a True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany. John Wiley and Sons, 2000.

Sometimes symphonies are given names (“The Eroica,” “The Unfinished”) and “the inextinguishable” is the name given to the Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s Symphony Number 4, completed in 1916. The Wikipedia citation for the work indicates that “the inextinguishable” applies not to the musical work itself but to that which is inextinguishable—the will to live. In that sense, the term is an apt choice for the musicologist Martin Goldsmith’s account of the lives of his parents in Germany through the 1930s.

While growing up in his parents’ home, Goldsmith knew he was Jewish, but his parents would not discuss their faith—or even own it. This book is the fascinating journey—both real and psychic—that Martin takes as he learns the story of his parents’ youth, their courtship and marriage, and finally their escape from National Socialism. In exploring the early lives of his parents, Goldsmith learns about the Judische Kulturbund created by the National Socialists as they first began to marginalize and then terrorize the Jewish community of Germany. Goldsmith’s parents emerge as heroic, though because of the family members left behind, they would never own up to any accomplishment on their part. In a sense the driving force in the their lives—as in the lives of their associates in various Kulturbund orchestras—is the power of music. His mother was compelled to play her viola and his father the flute. They were willing to take inordinate risks just to continue making music, even as the Nazi government made it less and less possible for any cultural life to remain among the nation’s Jews. Goldsmith’s book is not just a testament to the will to live but also a testament to the power of music.

This book tells a chapter in the sordid story of Nazi Germany that I had not been aware of previously. It is a story that will appeal to students of history and lovers of music. Most of all, just as was Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, it is a testimony to the “inextinguishable.”