After the war — apocalypse

On 12 April 1945 the Berlin Philharmonic gave its last performance. The atmosphere in Germany was apocalyptic, the Allied invasion was expected at any moment. The concert playlist had been devised by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, and included Brünnhilde’s last aria and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the ‘twilight of the gods’. There were reports that members of the Hitler Youth offered the audience cyanide capsules at the end.

Such was the grotesque theatre of the Nazi death cult; Speer was chief set-designer for the Reich, devising the Nuremberg Parade Grounds and the megalomaniacal concept of ‘Ruinenwert’ (‘ruin value,’ or buildings that decayed ‘well’.) These schemes were now inflected with macabre irony, as Hitler planned his own Führer-dämmerung. ‘Evil be on earth,’ goes the Icelandic Edda Völuspá, describing the twilight of the gods as ‘a wind-age, a wolf-age/ no man to another shall mercy show.’ The earth sinks into the sea, the sun turns black, the sky is scorched with fire.