Quotes from Anthony Heilbut

in French camps the habit of quoting became "virtually epidemic." In part, this was a legacy of Prussian education, with its rote exercises. It was also an attempt to combat the murderers of German culture.

Feuchtwanger's more dubious actions — e.g., he threw away cables that contained information pertaining to the prisoners but addressed to him personally, without informing the other prisoners of the cables' contents. When they learned of his callousness, the inmates were out for blood, but Schoenberner protected Feuchtwanger with the condescending defense that "by his own dim lights" he was "quite innocent.

Having lost his worldly goods, the refugee had become a fabulous collector, lugging around the portable property of memory and quotation.

Thus another émigré, the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, wrote, "If, despite everything, I should survive, then I owe it to Goethe.

another cultural hero, the German Jew Heinrich Heine. Carrying these poets with them out of Germany, still using them as they would have wished to be used, refugees saw themselves as the last protectors of the real humanist legacy, and they refused to yield it to the Nazis.

Yet others hummed snatches of German music: one émigré wrote that the melodies of Schubert or Beethoven seemed to reconstitute his dead father.

Their confidence in President Roosevelt was excessive. After the war, it became clear how little he had protected émigré interests: he did not publicize the existence of the death camps and he waited until January 22, 1944, to establish the War Refugee Board, long after it could have assisted in any organized rescue attempt. Perhaps the émigrés' initial distrust had not been

No doubt even more unforeseen denouements lie in somebody's archive, though few remain to care about them.

when Arnold Schoenberg replied to a student who had dreamed of composing a "soaring melody," that the proper word, surely, was "snoring." Such puns could be funny, cruel, and tone-deaf (in seven nations and twelve tones), comments of exasperation as often as they were attempts at endearment.

Just as Schoenberg, in Adorno's phrase, liberated color as a compositional element in music (Schoenberg was himself a painter)

I don't write lovely music." He was willing, however, to compose the score for the MGM production of The Good Earth. His demands were appropriate but unacceptable. He wanted fifty thousand dollars, and complete control of the soundtrack; the actors were to speak in the same pitch and key he composed in (as if Paul Muni and Luise Rainer didn't have enough difficulty playing Chinese peasants!).

personal animosity resonated throughout essays written as if music, the most subjective of aesthetic forms, had been elevated to the objectivity of scientific principles.

Adorno treated popular culture as a ghastly trick played by capitalism on the masses.

The easy lilt of a military anthem, the sexual glamour of uniforms, the evangelical fervor of a demagogue — the Berliners recognized the dangers because they had become susceptible themselves.

It was as if Heinrich too were beckoning an old age of despair, not of premature death but of a lingering death-in-life.