And 80,000 Germans turned their backs on Hitler..Bob Dylan's difficult relationship with Germany
A Complete Unknown, the new biopic about Bob Dylan, came out in the UK last week, and I immediately went to see it. I felt a bit out of place sitting in the cinema surrounded by Dylan obsessives. My taste in music is eclectic for all the wrong reasons: out of ignorance rather than refined taste.
To give an example: The other day I bumped into Nick Cave at a party (quite literally, walking into him backwards while retreating from the bar, drinks in hand). I know plenty of his fans would give their right arm to be in that situation, but I had no idea what to say to him. ‘You’re Nick Cave!’ seemed a bit naff. I apologised and shuffled off. His manager Brian Message kindly took mercy on me, introducing himself and giving me a chance to talk about other things.
My musical ignorance is not due to disinterest, however. I find it fascinating how entangled music is with social, cultural and political issues and with history. It was for that reason that I went to see the Bob Dylan film, to find out more about a figure that has shaped 20th-century music like few others.
I wasn’t disappointed. It was a great movie and the Dylan fans around me seemed to agree. The political nature of folk music, especially in the tense atmosphere of 1960s America, came through well, as did Dylan’s unique and sensitive responses to the world around him.
This made me think. Even I knew that Dylan is Jewish and that his original name was Zimmerman. But I had never given this much thought. There is a scene in the movie where there is a party at Dylan’s flat in New York, and a guest picks up one of his notebooks with his original name on it. His girlfriend quickly takes the notebook and covers it up, later asking Dylan about his past and not getting much out of him.
As far as I know, he has never explained the name change as a means of denying his origins as the descendant of two Jewish families whose roots stretch back to Lithuania and Ukraine. Using a different stage name was common among artists at the time anyway, and when asked about this in an interview decades later, he simply said, ‘You're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.’
Regardless of how Jewish people of Dylan’s generation feel about their origins, upbringing and identity, they tend to have strong views on post-war Germany one way or another. Or that has certainly been my experience, having encountered many Holocaust survivors and British Jews over the years.
The Nazis indiscriminately murdered the majority of European Jews with the intention of eradicating all of them. If you were Jewish and born in the wrong place at the wrong time, they tried to murder you, irrespective of whether you were orthodox, reformed, secularised, converted or non-religious. I can’t speak for Jews and what this means to them today, but a descendent of Holocaust survivors once said to me: ‘To you, this is history. To me, this is personal.’
Dylan was born in 1941 in Minnesota because his grandparents had fled earlier European pogroms. Had they not done that, their descendants would have been exposed to the genocidal terror unleashed by Nazi Germany. Was this the reason why he wouldn’t play in post-war Germany until 1978?
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