Of
Gustav Seibt
The matinee with speeches and music is a genre that Federal President Steinmeier particularly appreciates. He uses this format (as it is called today) for commemoration days and basic discussions on democratic politics. The Office of the President should be aware of the danger that the beauty of the musical framing will slip over the historical and political abysses of the occasion. So one could ask whether Gustav Mahler’s Rückert setting “I’m lost to the world” really represented an appropriate aesthetic response to a commemoration of November 9, 1938 and thus to the Holocaust. The Rückert song was sung during a ceremony in Bellevue Castle on the occasion of the past anniversary.