Michael Wieck

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Michael Wieck (born 1928) is a German violinist and author. He was the first violinist of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1974-93. In 1989 Wieck published a memoir, Zeugnis vom Untergang Königsbergs, in which he related his and his family's sufferings under the Nazis and, after the German defeat, under the Soviet occupation. This moving story has been translated into English and Russian.

[edit] Biography

Wieck was born in the East Prussian capital Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is the son of two Königsberg musicians who were widely known before the Nazi era, Kurt Wieck and Hedwig Wieck-Hulisch. They were founders of the popular Königsberger Streichquartet ("Königsberg String Quartette").

Because his mother was Jewish, Wieck and his sister, Miriam (born 1925), were declared Geltungsjuden ("certified Jews"). After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 they experienced the gradual ramping up of anti-Semitic discrimination and oppression. They were first ejected from public schools and sent to Jewish schools. They were later forbidden to attend classes at all, and Miriam was sent to a boarding school in Scotland in 1938, taking the place of another girl who had gone to the United States.

Shortly thereafter, Michael Wieck was compelled to work in factories. However, because the Wiecks were a mixed marriage — Kurt Wieck was not Jewish — they were not subjected to deportation and ultimately genocide, as were most members of Königsberg's Jewish community, the history of which dated back four centuries. Although the Wiecks experienced isolated acts of kindness from a few of their non-Jewish neighbors, they were tormented by others, and life became more and more difficult for them as the war dragged on.

In late August 1944 during World War II, Königsberg was repeatedly fire-bombed by the Royal Air Force, and much of the city's center, including the medieval castle and the 14th century cathedral, was destroyed, gutted, or heavily damaged. "The people of Königsberg shall never expunge these nights of terror from their memory," Wieck wrote.

When the Red Army conquered Königsberg on April 9, 1945, after a bitterly fought siege lasting nearly three months, the city had become a vast graveyard of rubble. Of the 316,000 people who had lived there before the war, perhaps 100,000 survived, and Wieck estimated that about half of these were to die of hunger, disease, or maltreatment before the last Germans were allowed to leave in 1949-50. The Soviet occupiers declined to recognize the few surviving German Jews as victims of the Nazis, and initially treated all German speakers as enemies.

Wieck's incarceration in a Soviet prison camp, and the story of how he and his parents barely managed to eke out an existence thereafter, occupy the second half of his book. In 1949, they finally were allowed to "emigrate" to truncated and divided Germany. After the war he lived first in West Berlin, then for seven years in New Zealand, then settled in Stuttgart.

In his memoir, Wieck muses on human nature and speculates on ultimate causes and the nature of the deity. Although he retains a strong emotional attachment to Judaism, he ultimately espouses a kind of deism, alluding to "a definite feeling of something 'lying behind it all' that always resists being put into words." Regarding human nature and humankind’s potential for good and evil, he says:

“

All people, be they musicians or politicians, Germans or New Zealanders, Jews or Christians, the persecutors or the persecuted, are frighteningly the same irrespective of different temperments, ideals and conventions. In all of us resides the potential for every possible action...

”

[edit] Works

Michael Wieck: Zeugnis vom Untergang Königsbergs: Ein "Geltungsjude" berichtet, Heidelberger Verlaganstalt, 1990, 1993, ISBN 3-89426-059-9.

Michael Wieck: A Childhood Under Hitler and Stalin: Memoirs of a "Certified Jew," University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, ISBN 0-299-18544-3.

[edit] References

This article incorporates text translated from the corresponding German Wikipedia article as of 5 January 2007.