Today, I introduce you to the term Irony.
This versatile word has a slew of meanings. Take this one, “an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.” Or maybe, “an objectively or humorously sardonic utterance, disposition, quality, etc.” Grooveshark has its own definition for Irony, and it reads something like this, “when you find out that Hitler was a big fan of Jewish Composers…”
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
“…Kept in a box for 62 years in the attic of a dacha near Moscow, the collection of gramophone discs had been been taken from Hitler’s Wilhelmstrasse bunker in Berlin by a Red Army reconnaissance officer, Capt. Lev Besymenski. Besymenski, who died this summer at the age of 86, was Jewish. After his death, his daughter Alexandra brought the box of some 100 LPs to Germany’s Spiegel magazine.
Hitler’s collection included works by the Russian composers Borodin, Rachmaninov and Mussorgski. In one of Hitler’s albums, the famous Polish Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman played works by Tschaikovsky. This has surprised historians, since Huberman, who fled Vienna in 1937, a year before the Anschluss, had been declared an enemy of the Third Reich. Hitler write in Mein Kampf that Jewish art ‘never existed.’”
There isn’t really a lesson here other than the fact that history makes strange bedfellows and occasionally, music can bridge some pretty wide divides. Sappy? Yea, but you couldn’t do any better.
[via: Jewish Telegraphic Agency]
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