1919 onwards –  a ‘bombshell’ from Karl Barth

We now need to go to the historic German town of Marburg, the place from where my rescuer Hans came. Soon after the devastating attack which caused my neck to be shattered and broken (for the second time), the German officer Hans Hoffman, who took pity on me, took me home with him; he was given a few weeks’ leave after a long period of heavy bombardment. I have no idea what happened to Charles, my owner.  I was taken to a famous luthier’s workshop in the main square in Marburg, Der Markt.  The luthier’s name was Karl Grimm, a distant relative of the famous Brothers Grimm of fairy-tale fame.

While I was being lovingly mended and restored, a young violinist entered the workshop.  Her name was Nelly Barth.  She was one of Hans Hoffman’s sisters, and married to a young Swiss theologian Karl Barth who was doing some research at Marburg University.  To my astonishment Nelly had come to Hans Grimm’s workshop for the purpose of having a look at me – on the express recommendation of her brother.

(Nelly & Karl Barth with their children 1916)

Sadly, Hans died from the raging ‘Spanish Flu’ which claimed over 50 million people after the Great War had ended.  This has given me cause for thought, as I am expressing these sonic memories soon after the Covid-19 pandemic which devastated huge numbers of people across the whole globe.

Like so many fiddlers before her, Nelly was besotted by my inner tone and voice.  So, that was it!  I was now taken home to be with Nelly and her theological husband Karl, who was himself a very keen and competent musician.

Karl Barth and ‘Liberalism’

Now we have come to a most remarkable chapter in my life, when I began to be affected by Karl Barth’s views.   

Karl was obsessed with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and his considerable theological contribution to 20th century thought was deeply influenced by this excessive devotion.  I learned early on in my time with the Barths, that something cataclysmic happened to Karl at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.  He was devastated, not only by the Germans over-running the Kingdom of Belgium, but mainly by the unexpected, and wholehearted support publicly given to the Kaiser’s aggressive policies by his esteemed teachers, including Adolf von Harnack and Wilhelm Herrmann.  Karl Barth had come to realise that nineteenth-century ‘liberalism’ (which Harnack & Herrmann & many others espoused) was leading to a ‘dead end’, and so his mission became focussed on finding an alternative.  The life and sounds created by W A Mozart somehow enabled him to address this theological magnum opus, ‘Dogmatic Theology’.  Anything created during and after the 19th century became highly suspect for Karl Barth!  Even Nelly played nothing with me written after the time of Mozart!  

(Dogmatic Theology’s many volumes)

It would have been fascinating to put Karl Barth alongside Nadia Boulanger and her students to discuss together the place (and future) of the nineteenth-century ‘heroic times of Wagnerism’ and consider the sounds of the more exotic Francophile sonorities, such as Debussy, Faure and Ravel.  Maybe Mozart could be easily linked to France, though I suspect Barth might have agreed with one of Boulanger’s students, who said that ‘Art has no Homeland’.  Neither has theology, I hope.

So these problems became acute when I realised that Barth’s onetime ‘idol’, my dear German friend and professor, Friederich Schleiermacher, was roundly denounced and rejected.  For Barth, Schleiermacher was guilty of letting loose the whole train of thought towards liberalism and the over-dependence of humanity’s experience of the ‘totally otherness’ of God.   Many other factors were at play and in the background –

• Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis,
• the growing influence of ‘Biblical Fundamentalism’,
• the rise of Pentecostalism,
• the infectious appeal of Jazz,
• the seeds of ‘Liberation Theology’ and
• the popularity of Heidegger’s ‘existentialism’

 etc.

There can be no doubt that Barth’s contribution to the world of thought is legendary and beyond measure, and his ‘Epistle to the Romans’ published at this time in 1919 was a major ‘game changer’ in the approach to biblical theology and to the art of preaching & proclamation, but this Barthian ‘bombshell’ served only to accentuate for me the musical conflict and rich counterpoint which I have been trying to explore in this journalistic adventure.

• To what extent can we reduce the level of musical experience so that my players and fiddlers are not falling victim to over-indulgence and self-gratification in the drawing of the bow across my strings? 

• Did the magic I felt within me when Friedrich Schleiermacher first picked me up in my Moravian luthier’s workshop in Berlin and when he played me with such sensitivity all those years ago, with its sound world wonderfully turning me upside down, have no depth of ultimate meaning or richness or fulfilment?

Is all the music composed after Mozart really falling into a self-indulgent ‘trap’, full of human gratification with no acknowledgement of the otherness of God?  Nadia Boulanger, I guess, could not accept such a thought!

The thing which struck me most about my time in the Barthian household was the sonic atmosphere.  As Nelly frequently played me with Mozart’s pieces, mostly at Karl’s request, I became aware of the sounds, accents and inflexions in Karl’s voice, as he worked on his world-changing ideas.  In his later years, he played records of Mozart’s music every day before starting work on his monumental ‘Dogmatics’.   Karl Barth was a Swiss, and  he always expressed himself in the German language with a Swiss dialect. It reminded me of that story I heard about John Wesley at his ‘conversion’ in 1738 when he heard the sound of Luther’s Preface to the Letter to the Romans’, spoken in the German tongue, but in this particular instance with a Bohemian Moravian dialect rather than Swiss.

Is it a coincidence that the St Paul’s Letter to the Romans commanded such interest for both Barth and Wesley?  My latest owner, Harvey, who studied theology in the early 1970s found the thoughts of Karl Barth extremely difficult to grasp intellectually – but he gave me the impression that there might be some insight, albeit small in quantity, to be gained by approaching the text of his Commentary on Romans as a symphony by W A Mozart.  Does Barth’s dialectical theology have more influence when experienced in sonic terms?  Can we ‘hear’ what Barth is writing, as well as see it?

As a modern writer says: ‘The left brain construes Christ as concept; the right brain as percept—something directly perceived by the senses’.

We shall hear more of Karl Barth when I recount later on my remarkable encounter with one of his students, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.