In ‘War and the pity of war’ (Gdn., film&music, Fri., 23.09.11) Ian Bostridge makes two implicitly political points in his article on Britten’s War Requiem. One is to the effect that Benjamin Britten’s visit to Bergen-Belsen in 1945 called into question his pacifism. “How could…[he] not experience doubt in the face of his own abdication from the great tragedy and endeavour of the age?” This appears to imply that the WW2 was fought against racist Nazism, and to save its most prominent, the Jews of Europe from being systematically murdered.
This appalling crime was not mentioned once by the West in the course of the hostilities. The UK and the US authorities knew what was going on. They received information from Jewish (mostly religious) sources. The Polish Resistance went to very great trouble to inform London and Washington about what was happening in Auschwitz and other extermination camps. There were detailed day on day reports from the listening station at Bletchley Park.
The War was entered into by the UK in pursuit of its traditional ‘balance of power’ policy. Germany was becoming overmighty. We were allowed afterwards to convince ourselves that it was a great moral endeavour to destroy murderous fascism. But nothing was done to destroy the extermination camps even in 1944 and ’45 when British and US aircraft dominated the skies over west and central Europe. They could have blasted Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the rest, to dust.
Mr. Bostridge muses on the international situation when the War Requiem was first performed. He writes of the baritone’s line, “[a]fter the blast of lightening from the east”, that “listeners would have been thinking of nuclear apocalypse”. Implicitly that the ’eastern’ Reds (who liberated Auschwitz) were more likely than us in the civilised West, to have started a nuclear war. No evidence has ever been brought forward to sustain this notion. And the USSR’s archives were wide open for a decade to allow historians to prove that the Communists in the Kremlin were so minded.
They were materialists, not practitioners of an ersatz religion promising them paradise. They believed that when death came along, one simply turned to dust. It was the least likely philosophical position for people contemplating the destruction of the planet.
Seán McGouran