Gerard Menuhin: Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil
A review by Fredrick Töben
The book has no chapters but divides into four sections, which makes for challenging reading:
I–to p 162: Thwarted: Humanity’s Last Grasp For Freedom;
II–to p 294: Identified: Illumination Or The Diagnostic Of Darkness;
III–to p 366: Extinguished: Civilization;
IV–to p 457: Final Stage: Communist Vassalage.
Section I: Thwarted:
Humanity’s Last Grasp For Freedom
The heading conveys a grave, almost certainly a pessimistic message, and so with pencil in hand I begin to read through the section and immediately notice how Menuhin’s autobiographical account of his awakening to the German problem begins at home in England between the expressed views of his mother and father on the gassing allegations. His mother reminds him that had he been about in Germany during the war, then he would have been gassed, while his father, Yehudi – 1916-1999, the world renowned violinist – never talks about the war. This creates a conceptual dissonance that is further accentuated through Menuhin spending a year at the primary section of the private Salem boarding school at Lake Constance where he feels the German children around him are just like any other children. And later he also realizes that it does not make sense to him that a highly cultured nation, such as Germany has always been, could have become a part of a genocidal plan to exterminate the Jews. The final straw moment, so to speak, occurs when he is engaged in cleaning up his late grandparents’ home and finds copies of Gerhard Frey’s National-Zeitung.
