Pages from the documents at the House of the Wannsee Conference that specifically mention the Mischlinge.
Listen to the BBC Radio 3 feature on music created by concentration camp prisoners while they were in prison.
“From string quartets in Theresienstadt and tender ghetto lullabies to the fighting songs of the Jewish partisans, macabre camp ballads, and sardonic cabaret. Nazism's victims used music to document their lives, to mourn the loss of home and family, to show solidarity with the anti-fascist cause, to escape reality, to indulge in gallows humour. They also made music on the orders of their jailers, who used music both to celebrate and to oppress.”
“Who is a Jew? A matter of life or death in Nazi Germany, the definition dug back into a family’s past with dire consequences. People with a mixed heritage, however remote in their genealogy, were “Mischlinge,” and many suffered the same fates as the fully Jewish citizens of Germany and its conquered nations.
Who am I? Carolyn Enger, the descendant of a Mischlinge survivor family, found herself lost in an identity maze: Christian? Jewish? In a no-man’s land between?
Her program is a performance event using videos of her family and moments from German Jewish history, music and poetry from German Jews and converts, and a discussion of the journey to her own identity. Ms. Enger accompanies the video with feelingly played selections by Mendelssohn, Mahler and Schoenberg and others.
In a presentation at our school was an especially moving experience for Holocaust survivors and their descendants in the audience, with whom she engaged in a lively and personal dialog.”
—Nahum Bachrach, Institute of New Dimensions
A New York Times article from last April worth revisiting is James Angelos' “The New Europeans” from the April 10, 2016 issue of The New York Times Magazine. This quote is a great summation and starting point for the article:
“A small Bavarian village tries to welcome its refugees – and grapples with fear, prejudice and the shifting nature of what it means to be German.”
Read the article on The New York Times Magazine website.
A wonderfully heartening story that tolerance can indeed be taught and compassion can indeed be learned! Via WNYC News: