Kirmizi_ada

It is still warm enough to buy a caramel corduroy overcoat for 4 Euros and then lavishly salt it away in the closet for later. Warm enough to walk down Kreuzburger Strasse comfortably humming “Zug es mir noch amool” by the Barry Sisters.
Radio Berlin Brandenburg, which is almost as endearingly staid as NPR, is still describing the weather as spätsommerlich freundlich. It is indeed still warm enough so that tonight around 11:30, on the empty fleamarket lot across Langenscheid Bridge from Red Island, a high school student was practicing the Aşık Veysel song “Gündüz Gece,” thinking he was alone. The singer stopped and waited for me to pass, I slipped behind an empty trailer and pulled my feet up onto the trailer beam to wait for him to continue. I am still waiting.

Does anyone know the Mozart opera Idomeneo? The Deutsche Oper (German Opera) in Berlin decided today to cancel its production of the piece, because it anticipated retribution from political Islamists. Apparently the staging was to include Jesus- and Mohammed-heads, which were ostensible fodder for terrorist attacks on the opera house. During the past 24 hours, a strange yelling pageant has ensued locally between apologists and chest-beaters—about art, freedom, and cowardice. Germany’s Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) was one of the first incensed citizens on the scene, poised to call the decision “ridiculous.” Press commentators grimace and mull “ob Selbstzensur auf der Grundlage eines diffusen Bedrohungsgefühls gerechtfertigt ist” [“whether self-censorship based on a diffuse feeling of being threatened is justifiable.”]

I fear a new trend in which liberal policy-makers and art-promoters are seeing wisdom in steering widely around the “Pope Benedikt syndrome,” around the vague eventuality of being called to account in an unpleasant way. No net increase in respect issues from this approach, just a lot of opera singers with extra songs to hum on the subway home.

So: two beautiful things no one will get to hear tonight: the end of Gündüz Gece out on the fleamarket lot and the beginning of Idomeneo in the Deutsche Oper.

NEXT TIME: Gooski’s on Polish Hill?