Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 38

used as a façade of normalcy to fool the international community. Prisoners
did not surreptitiously create a ��,��� volume library in the ghetto (Intrator
����:���), nor did others stay up all night to stage Carmen in their native
Czech before the Nazi decree that everything be performed in German
(Karas ����), because it would liberate them. Rather, these prisoners used
opera, literature, classical music, and painting as survival tactics because it
preserved what was left of their humanity and allowed them to endure. But
more profoundly, they found pleasure in recreating cultural practices from
their former lives, especially music as it was central to Central European
culture. Adorno’s (����:��) statement that for the European bourgeois subject
“the deprivation of art would be unbearable for him” helps explain the way
in which so many prisoners feared losing the arts. If performing music in
the ghetto guaranteed the continuation of European-Jewish culture, the
individual Jew could survive Theresienstadt (Tuma ����).
Whereas low art is often fun and pleasurable, only high art can sustain and
inspire the human condition. We are the only ones responsible for nurturing
the quality of our own experience.
References
(����) How a Nation Engages with Art: Highlights from the ���� Survey
of Public Participation in the Arts. National Endowment for the Arts.
Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts.
Adorno, Theodor. (����) Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Adorno, Theodor. (����) Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Collini, Stefan. (����) Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Epstein, Joseph. (����) The Cultured Life: And why it is worth pursuing. The
Weekly Standard. March ��.
Epstein, Joseph. (����) Where Have All the Critics Gone? Commentary. March
��.
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