Jesse's Café Américain: Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Götterdämmerung

"On April 11th 1945, as the Red Army fast-approached Berlin, the Berlin Philharmonic gave what might have been its last concert before the end of the war. Albert Speer, who had intervened to save members of the Orchestra from their senseless drafting into the Volksturm, organized a final concert, entitled Konzert für Minister Speer in the Berlin Beethoven Hall, still curiously standing amidst the city’s rubble.

According to most sources as well as popular myth, Speer engineered a move for the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic to the relative peace of Bayreuth, but they chose to remain with their Berliner audiences until the end of the war. The Orchestra’s final concerts were given in candlelight, under bombing and with Hitler Jugend children offering the exiting members of the audience cyanide capsules for private use, adding to the tragic and conclusive atmosphere of the whole affair.

The people of Berlin, suffering greatly as they were in those last months of the war, might have found the lush Wagnerian orchestral landscape extremely poignant in the face of defeat and the accompanying humiliation, pillaging and rape which they feared it would bring.

The Orchestra went on to give two more concerts, in which the main works were – fittingly – the Deutsches Requiem by J. Brahms and Tod und Verklärung by J. Strauss. It becomes quite clear from the choice of repertoire that the Orchestra was now playing a funeral march for the entire nation. This neurosis of being unable to see an alternative future in which the German nation might exist outside of final victory, is best reflected at the infanticide that took place in the bunker by Magda Goebbels.

According to Traudl Junge the Goebbels’ children sang for Hitler, who was very pleased to hear their song. This innocent choir of young voices was soon murdered by its very mother, in the bunker, just before the mother herself committed suicide. There is no academic phrasing suitable enough to describe the incomprehensibility of how mankind can achieve this nonsense, especially at this high level of leadership."

Panayiotis Demopoulos, Götterdämmerung: Suicide Music and the National Self

"Upon her recent passing at the age of 76, I took the opportunity to reread Bubby's memoirs. In four different instances, my grandmother had stood—amid the smoke of the crematoriums, the barking dogs, the trampling boots and swinging clubs—on the infamous selection line at the head of which Mengele and his minions stood, pointing left and right, sentencing some to back-breaking labor, and sending others to the gas chambers.

Indeed, the miracles and the mysteries of the events of those days abound along with the horrors and the tragedies. In contrast to the vile actions of the 'Angel of Death' were the noble and heroic actions of many 'Angels of Life' who stood ready to risk their own lives for the sake of saving that of a stranger. It is thanks in no small part to 'angels' like these, who stepped out from behind their own misery and grief to come to the aid of others, that generations now live on to tell the story. How clearly we see the infinite ripple effects of single acts of kindness and compassion, even if accomplished in a split second."

Yossi Refson, Angels of Light

"The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”

Maximilian Kolbe

The German people had their music. We have a confabulation of clickbait websites and talk radio.

These cacophonies suffocate common sense and conscience, and drive national madness to a fiery abyss. The will to victory and power becomes an overpowering will to die.