Walk on by …

Walk On By — The Story Of Popular Song — was one of those many television offerings that so clearly differentiates the ABC from the rest of the pack.

I enjoyed the series immensely, notwithstanding that my response was about equally balanced between delight in the music and despair with where it occasionally led me.

This latter response was ignited initially by references to people like Gershwin and Irving Berlin and other Jewish song writer/composers who played such a pivotal role in the evolution of popular music over the past century. Many of them were first generation refugees from the horrors of the First World War — the so-called Great War! — and the looming terrors of Nazism.

That takes me back to another Berlin. The city of Berlin. I had been in Germany a few times but it was only a decade ago that I visited Berlin itself for the first time. To me, Berlin has been a sort of bell-wether of the past century — perhaps of many centuries. It has been at the centre of two world wars, a great depression and the evolution and decline of communism.

It has been divided and united.

It has reflected the best and the worst of human behaviour. Hope and despair; courage and brutality; triumph and defeat; creativity and cruelty. Great writing, music, thinking, cinematography and more has been juxtaposed across the years with tyranny, corruption and debasement of the human spirit.

Original sin

There have been historians who verged on accusing the German people of original sin. It could only have happened to the Germans, they seemed to be saying, but we know better now. We’ve seen the tyrannies and political blood lusts of old world despots like Stalin and Milosovic and the new world versions like Amin, Mugabe and too many others.

In any event, the historian Alan Bullock warned us against rushing to judgement. He reminded us of the retribution imposed on Germany at Versailles and then took us back to John Donne who, in turn, reminded us that:

No man is an island; every man is a piece of the continent …
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

And then I thought of Hitler. I can’t think of Germany without thinking of Hitler. He is part of me. He was part of my childhood — he changed my life for ever — and he is part of me still. I think it is the horror that was Hitler that takes me back so often to Marlene Dietrich singing Lili Marlene. I play it from time to time and I play it because I’m a nostalgic and because it thumbed a nose at Hitler and all that he stood for and because I don’t mind shedding a quiet tear in a good cause. Marlene was not the greatest of all singers but she was a great trouper. Marlene knew how to put a song over.

I thought, too, of the 1936 Olympic Games when Hitler was looking to prove the superiority of the Aryan race on the athletic track. He failed there, too, because a black American named Jesse Owens won four gold medals. To Hitler, it was an offensively black thumbed nose.

And that took me back again to Walk On By. If you saw it, you may recall Ethel Walters — I think it was Ethel Walters — singing and weeping, from the very soul of her race, that her man “……aint comin’ home no more.” Like a lot of black men of that time in America, he wasn’t coming home because he had been strung from crude gallows by the neck, by white racists.

And, give or take a decade or so, that was around the time that Jesse Owens was winning those medals in Berlin under the American flag. Funny old world. And that made me think of all sorts of injustices in all sorts of countries all around the world.

Then. Since. Now.

Some fought against Hitler, many fought for him and some — like the Berlins and Gershwins — went elsewhere. I look across from my desk at a portrait painted by one of those refugees. I remember her telling me how, walking home, she found herself on the outer fringes of a Hitler rally and was appalled to feel herself being swayed by the hypnotic quality of the dictator’s rhetoric. Shortly after that she was on her way to Australia. Her brother came too and had the dubious pleasure of trying to teach me German. Our society was enriched by many thousands of such people.

And then there was Isherwood. Christopher Isherwood was something of a nomad but also a refugee, of a kind, although to the extent that he sought refuge he sought it from prejudice rather than from overt persecution. He was also one of the finest writers of his time. Isherwood spent four years in Berlin in the 1930s and gave us such classics as Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin which, as best as I can recall, became the film I am a Camera which became the musical Cabaret.

Cabaret’was especially memorable for its re-creation of that teasing, mysterious, seamy, underbelly of a society in decline, featuring people wanting to forget, or get out. Joel Gray and Liza Minelli were terrific down in that cellar-club-bar. Upstairs, on the grand streets like Unter den Linden, was where the Nazis saw only a triumphal march to world domination. Thankfully, they were wrong.

Thumbed his nose

So, Isherwood also thumbed his nose at Hitler but it didn’t do any good. Perhaps it never does. Looking back, there was an inevitability about Hitler’s rise and fall although the fall part was a bit of a narrow squeak there for a while.

Lena Horne and Ella were on the first part of Walk On By but Nina Simone wasn’t. She came later. She’s dead now but Nina was special. Nina knew about the men who aint comin’ home. You listen to Nina singing My Way her way or That’s Him Over There and you’ll hear a very strong lady. You’ll hear a great singer weaving her way through the moods of a great race. We’re a bit coy and constipated with this soul business but not the Afro-Americans or the Africans, especially the West Africans.

Their hearts are on their sleeves and their souls are on display — – especially in song and dance and music.

Another Berlin

And there is another angle to this Berlin thing. It was back in the early sixties and a foreign service colleague was telling me about this friend of his whom he had met in Bonn. He was a British spook of some kind and sounded a good fellow. His name was David Cornwell. I forgot the conversation until, only a couple of years later, I met the colleague again and, recalling our previous exchange, asked what had become of David Cornwell. “Oh’, he replied, ‘ He’s tossed it in and turned his hand to writing. Using the name Le Carre. John Le Carre.” Now, there’s a fellow who knows his Berlin — nearly as well as that bloke Smiley.

But there is, or was, yet another Berlin. Perhaps many more but one in particular. The late Isaiah Berlin, the English scholar and philosopher, wrote an essay on history — as seen by Tolstoy in War and Peace — entitled The Hedgehog and the Fox. It is a brilliant piece of writing and thinking, by one of the great thinkers of his time. Early on in the essay, Berlin makes the following observation:

“Utterly unlike her as he is in almost every other respect, Tolstoy is, perhaps, the first to propound the celebrated accusation that Virginia Woolf half a century later levelled against the public prophets of her own generation — Shaw and Wells and Arnold Bennett — blind materialists who did not begin to understand what it is that life truly consists of, who mistook its outer accidents, the unimportant aspects which lie outside the individual soul — the so-called social, economic, political realities — for that which alone is genuine, the individual experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the colours, smells, tastes, sounds and movements, the jealousies, loves, hatreds, passions, the rare flashes of insight, the transforming moments, the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute all there is — which are reality.”

That surely says it all.

It is the absolute, immutable connection at the end of all the cumbersome and convoluted connections I have sought to make. It is why people like Marlene and Lena and Ella and Nina were good at what they did. Not because their pitch was perfect or because their phrasing was impeccable. No, its because they were real people connecting with real people …

They sang — and still sing — to people about themselves because they understood them. They are from them and of them. They bare their souls and we are the richer that they do so.

Oh that it might be so in all areas of human endeavour.

Nick Evers, born in November, 1937, has been a diplomat, trade policy advisor, economic/management consultant, university lecturer, Premier’s Department head, Liberal Government minister (1986-89) company director, Chairman, TT-Line Company Pty Ltd (1995-05), chairman of Forest Industries Association of Tasmania (2004-05), occasional consultant, columnist and writer.