Martin Goldsmith is a senior commentator on NPR. He hosted Performance Today, NPR’s daily classical music program, for 10 years. His parents Gunther and Rosemarie Goldschmidt survived the Nazis in part because of their involvement in the Kulturbund, the sole cultural outlet for Jews approved by the Nazis in 1930’s Germany.  I thought of my mother a lot because she loves classical music and listened to it all the time. The names of artists, conductors and composers came flying back to me throughout this book — I recognized them all. My favorite quote from the book happens to come from the same source as the title. Jewish Danish composer Carl Nielsen wrote his Symphony No. 2 in a response to World War I. It became known as the Inextinguishable Symphony. Nielsen said, at the outbreak of WW2, “The whole world seems to be disintegrating. National feeling, which up to know was regarded as something lofty and beautiful, has instead become like a spiritual syphilis which has destroyed the brains, and it grins out through the empty eye sockets with moronic hate.” He could have been talking about Nazi Germany. He could have been talking about any number of countries or times. This book told a story of Nazi Germany that I had not heard before. Thanks for loan, Sheila.
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