Robert Zweiman, National Commander of the Jewish War Veterans of the U.S.A., warned today that “the recent case of a known West German Nazi musicologist being invited as an honored guest in the United States,” demonstrates the need for constant vigilance in these matters.
Although the musicologist, Wolfgang Boetticher reportedly cancelled his attendance at a Schumann-Mendelssohn music festival sponsored by the University of North Carolina and Duke University “before the outcry became too loud,” Zweiman said, “the issues raised by this incident remain.”
The JWV commander credited the “excellent February 9 JTA report by Rochelle Wolk” for calling attention to the invitation extended to Boetticher who was an assistant to the notorious racist and convicted war criminal Alfred Rosenberg during the Nazi era.
Dr. Piero Weiss, of Columbia University’s Music Department, documented Boetticher’s Nazi past, prompting a flood of protest letters from American musicologists of all faiths to Profs. Jon Finson and Larry Todd, the festival organizers who had invited Boetticher.
Zweiman noted that Boetticher was invited because of his reputed scholarship on Schumann. He applied that scholarship during the Nazi era by pinpointing the Jewish origins of many German musicians and composers so that the Nazis could ban their works and single them out for persecution. Boetticher’s Nazi essays distorted the relationship between Mendelssohn and Schumann because of Mendelssohn’s Jewish origin. “When racism perverts scholarship, how valuable a scholar can Boetticher be?” Zweiman asked.
Noting that Boetticher visited the U.S. in 1961, Zweiman explained that this was before passage of the Holtzman Law in 1978 which forbids the granting of visas to anyone who was engaged in religious, racist persecution under the Nazis. “The law is on the books, but it is vital that documentation of the likes of Boetticher be maintained in order to ensure vigorous enforcement of the law,” Zweiman said.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
