Performed by Ensemble X:

Ellen Jewett - Violin
Elizabeth Simkin - Violoncello
Xak Bjerken - Piano

Turkish Premiere - August 2018, Cappadocia.

Art: Max Ernst

Leaked Tape from the Sacred Mysteries (2018) for piano trio

A radio play made by Noise of Shade (Nikolai Galen (voices) and Dolf Planteijdt (soundwork)) at the Worm studio in Rotterdam 29.10-3.11.12 with additional work at the Koeienverhuur Mobile in Amsterdam.
The Radio Worm edit is a shorter version of the VPRO edit.
The Resonance FM version is a live performance of the same text.
Based on a play text by Nikolai Galen which includes both invented and quoted texts.
With thanks to Radio Worm.

Genesis
In 2010 Enrique Pardo of Pantheatre asked me to write the text for a performance of Hitler which he’d started working on. I’d read quite widely about both the Holocaust and the Second World War (which my father and uncle were in), and I remember the bombsites and crumbling coastal defences of my childhood, but felt to attempt to do justice to the subject - both fascinating and repellent in equal measure - I needed to read further. I’m still reading. 
The War is (amongst other things) a case history of humanity’s Promethean dark side, not so far removed from the present as to be dismissible as ‘history’, and also something which happened in the very heart of European civilisation, not on any so-imagined barbarian periphery. The present version of that civilisation is very much a reaction to the War’s devastation while also being the continuation of the history and culture which led to it – notably in our nation states, nationalisms, prejudices and propensity for social violence, especially violence we can export – be it Algeria, Vietnam, Chechnya, Yugoslavia or Iraq. And the ugliness keeps bubbling up more forcibly whenever there’s a crisis. In the forms of – amongst numerous other examples - a Norwegian mass-murderer, neo-fascist political parties in Greece, the Netherlands, Serbia and elsewhere, in the ‘sovereign democracy’ of today’s Russia, and, most sadly, in Israel and Palestine.
 
The text
I found myself writing texts not only for Hitler but also for contemporaries of his – Jews, Allied leaders, Nazis and other fascists – and for people – mostly anti-Semites of one form or another – whose bigotry and slander were part of the making of the combustible current which carried Hitler into power. I also wrote texts for Hitler’s most steadfast and beloved companion – his dog – and for the Norse god Wotan, as a mythological principle at work in the heart of Nazi ideology. For many of the characters predating Hitler, as well as some of his contemporaries and some who came later, I preferred to simply quote what they’d said or written. Where there were no appropriate texts, I invented them. And one of the challenges of this performance is how to navigate this mixture of ‘true’, documentary texts (true in one sense but also subjective and partial) and texts which aspire to poetic rather than historical truth. The distinction is easy to make on paper, not so obvious in performance.
And so ‘Hitler’ became a sprawling, unfinished, unfinishable collection of texts, some written by me, some quoted, which I illustrated and explained with photos, pictures and footnotes. For now, I regard it as a work-in-progress - there are still many more texts I’d like to add before I can call it finished. And every book I read about the subject – most recently, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, a book which defied my preconceptions – sets off new thoughts I must include.
 
The sound-play for Radio Worm, VPRO, Resonance FM and other radio stations
Last year, Radio Worm of Rotterdam asked me to propose something to be recorded in their studio and later broadcast. I proposed a version of Hitler, and they agreed. I invited Dolf Planteijdt, a Dutch sound-artist, musician and producer, to collaborate on the piece. And, over a week later that year, we made together the radio version of the play using my voice as source material and Dolf playing the analogue synths of the Worm studio.
For this version, we found ourselves layering and treating voices in ways which led me to thinking that we were purposely giving voice to Hitler and the other protagonists without (anyway impossible for the medium) giving them body. The voices are disembodied. They float by like phantoms. The texts we chose for the radio play are particularly obsessed with death - one could say, with the factory production of phantoms. One could also say that Hitler aimed to make his Promethean utopia (the dystopia to end all dystopias) out of death. Presumably, out of death he thought he’d be able to resurrect a better (for das Volk at least) kind of life. Instead, out of death he produced the final, vast and awful nothing of loss, silence and phantoms. The phantoms of obliterated people and cultures which can never be resurrected, only remembered and mourned.

And perhaps our terrible (globally-speaking) times are not as different from those terrible times as we’d like to believe. War carries on unabated in its demented fury, and some of those wars, like those in the Middle East, have their roots partially in the Second World War. And as we ravage the planet, we’re also leaving behind us loss, silence and phantoms, with much more, and maybe much worse, to come. On the one hand it seems absurd to call, say, George W. Bush a little Hitler; but I'm not so sure. The veneer may be politer, and the process of gaining power more 'democratic' (but not for the victims, who have no say in it), but was, say, Bush really so much less Promethean, especially with the power of his country carrying him to destruction like a juggernaut.
But I don't want to single out the United States, many other states, including mine, are just as bad, only not as powerful. Anyway, it seems to me that what happened one lifetime ago has faded from the memories of many, especially those only whose grandparents lived through the War. Trying to bring the horrors of Hitler and his myriad accomplices back to life seems essential to me. But let them stay only as phantom voices. Giving them flesh (as in films) doesn't seem to carry sufficient unease to be much other than another entertainment (even if horrific), just another war movie. But when we only hear the voices, they enter our heads, we can't keep them out, and we have to engage with them; to never forget them and recognize that the times have not changed fundamentally at all. And the inextricable, unresolvable contradictions of those times are just as strong today, and in need of constant airing – the prime role of art in my view – if we’re to have any chance of something we could call ‘progress’.
There’s also a second performance of the same edit of the text performed live in a rush for Resonance FM in London earlier this month. The actors were Nikolai Galen, Tam Dean Burn and Peter Smith, with sound treatments by James S. Finn. The programme was hosted by Johny Brown.
The radio plays can be heard at soundcloud.com/galning/sets/hitler.

 
The content
While choosing and writing the different texts which make up the piece, I found myself wrestling with some specific themes. Namely:

Anti-Semitism: What is it in essence? Where does it spring from? How on Earth has it survived and festered for millennia? Why did it explode so pathologically in Hitler's thinking and Nazism in general? Presumably most of us (me included) sometimes have feelings of discomfort (a small step away from prejudice) in the presence of people (perhaps of a different ethnic group, or a different social class, or a different religion, or a different sexuality, or whatever) who seem especially other to us, whose presence, whose cultural differences can irritate us, even though, at the same time, we might (I hope) be irritated with ourselves for being irritated and for being host to prejudice. Yet it's an awfully, almost unimaginably long way from such feelings to genocide. Yet there are plenty of populist politicians and their supporters around, happy to flirt with racism and its siblings in their various forms (they're taking our jobs, they're thieves, layabouts, incompatible with our ways and beliefs, they're weakening our culture, they don’t ‘integrate’, etc.) fomented by nationalism, by myths of cultural difference and superiority, by a nationalist claim of us versus them, and for this land being our land and all that. Bigotry is alive, well and kicking, as a vast and shameful number of contemporary killings and 'cleansings' testify, most obviously in the world's numerous 'conflict zones'.

Hitler's popularity in Germany: How on Earth could such a pathetic, mad (but not insane) and deluded man be so popular, or at least tolerated, and for so long? Was Hitler mad, does it explain anything to call him a psychopath? And what does it mean to say that he was evil? And given that he was evil - radically evil - then how was he so popular, so indulged and empowered? Even how is it possible that, amongst others, the German generals didn’t get rid of him when it was obvious long before the end that Hitler was hell-bent.

How could 20th century European culture, in the form of Nazism, be so unimaginably violent, sadistic, brutal, even without rational justification, however mendacious? There were no military reasons for the death camps, nor the destruction of swathes of the Soviet Union as those regions were conquered or abandoned. It was as if the (German) nation (as imagined by itself) was infected with a bloodlust to extirpate the other.

What does it mean to say (as Jung does, amongst others) that Hitler was some kind of incarnation of the German collective psyche, of the national myth (made even more absurdly given that Hitler was no strapping, fair-haired athlete)? What are the myths at the heart of Nazism, from what do they derive their power and where are they now?

And God… As Gitta Sereny writes, where was God in the middle of the Holocaust? That belief in a supreme agent which can be called on to explain everything. Like notions of fate - it’s not us, we didn’t do it, God did it, God let it happen, therefore somehow we are personally off the hook.

All of which I could only scratch the surface of. And the more I scratched, the deeper I found myself in the bowels of Western Culture. And it's not a pleasant place...

Nikolai Galen
March 2013


Hitler (rejoice for we are absolved) (Radio Worm version, Worm edit - same as VPRO but shorter)

Stockholm Saxophone Quartet:
Mathias Björnstad
Jörgen Pettersson
Anna Magnusson
Linn Persson

Livestream: Johan E.Andersson
The concert was presnted by Estonian Music Days 2020

As I studied the recordings of various wolf howls I quickly learned that sensing each other’s presence through songs or voices, and the power or intimacy such a common experience creates is familiar both to people and the loneliest wolf cub. I viewed the spectral track of two different wolf packs and found fascinating musical references in the howling ensembles of the pack members. For example, in one of my recordings, the alpha established a specific pitch, the next wolf joined by sliding downwards, the third by sliding upwards and together they reached a pulsating unison that resounded throughout the woods. This pitch was also picked up on the other side of the forest and so they kept answering each other in this multi-choral manner for three minutes. While the pulsating unison might amplify the sound and give the impression that the number of wolves is greater, without the purpose of claiming territory the wolves’ bodies release happiness hormones and strengthen the ties within the pack.
In these 3 pieces similarly to wolves, the saxophones interact with each other in a temporally flexible manner, choosing and synchronising entrances and listening to the delicate microtonal shades of the unison.

Us... and Them... (2020) for saxophone quartet and wolves

Nikolai Galen is a performer and writer living in Istanbul

Hitler (rejoice for we are absolved) (Radio Worm version, Worm edit - same as VPRO but shorter)

Nikolai Galen

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