Wolfgang R. Kubizek
… und alle Toten starben friedlich…
... and all of them died peacefully...
Oratorio in five parts
for solo singers, choir and orchestra
Lyrics by Vladimir Vertlib
The protagonist is a young woman who tries to come to terms with the painful history of the Shoah and the killing of millions of people in concentration camps and death camps during the Nazi era. She doesn’t know how to deal with this emotional and ethical burden.
At first, she escapes into fantasies and tries to imagine that the concentration camp in Mauthausen has never existed. The voices of those who survived the tortures, however, force her to face reality by telling her about forced labour in the quarries, about selections and death marches. By talking to a number of different people the young woman gets to know a variety of diverging opinions about the crimes committed during the Nazi era.
An anti-Semite presents her relativist view of history; a pseudo-revolutionary proponent of the demonstrations and student revolts of 1968 drowns the history of the Shoah in his general complaints about the evil inherent in human nature; the daughter of a Shoah survivor talks about her suffering still being caused by history and about the lack of will to take a closer look at historical facts on the part of the perpetrators’ descendants; and the son of a Wehrmacht veteran tells her about his futile attempts to talk with his father about his involvement in the Nazi crimes.
These encounters leave the young woman in a state of severe uncertainty. “What is the path I am supposed to follow?” is one of her last questions to the choir of victims whose voices appeared again and again throughout the performance. “What are the lessons to be learned?” and “What can I hope for in the end?” The victims’ answers don’t guide her the way, they don’t teach her any lessons, and they don’t comfort her. However, she knows that they are present with their own experiences.
The existence of the victims cannot be utilized or denied; they all tell her what happened. The young woman can refer to their voices when gradually finding her way through history, torn between emotions of despair, guilt and hope.
(Original summary written in German by Christian Angerer)
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