IIn the entrance area of the James Simon Gallery, the visitor center on Berlin's Museum Island, lies an elegant lion made of light limestone. At the beginning of the last century, everyone who entered the publisher Rudolf Mosse's palace on nearby Leipziger Platz passed him by. In 1933, the National Socialists confiscated the family's property.
There has been a piano next to the lion since Sunday. It is intended to remember what happened to people 90 years later because they are Jews. There is also a piano with yellow stickers in the pedestrian zone in Tel Aviv, one in a subway station in Tokyo and one in Washington Square Park in New York, which was played all day long on Sunday. In Germany of all places, the security situation is seen as too difficult to allow an instrument in a very public space to become a memorial to the more than 130 abductees who are still being held captive in Gaza.
The piano invites you to play
The piano will stay in the visitor center named after the Jewish patron James Simon for almost two weeks and invites you to play. The effect that music can have when it hits you suddenly in everyday life will only develop to a limited extent; The small concert that the pianist Igor Levit gave on Sunday afternoon could only be attended by invitation.
On day 100 of Hamas' attack on Israel, Berlin, like Tel Aviv, London and Paris, became a place of warning to make every effort to free the hostages. In Germany, other issues have now come to the fore: the floods, the farmers' protests. On Sunday, we remembered those whose world has not moved since October 7th. Before the event in the museum there was a memorial march, which was also organized together with the very active forum of the families of the hostages and missing people, some relatives came. At least 600 people joined the procession.
What to do in case of provocations?
Before it started, the demonstrators were instructed what to do in the event of provocations, such as chants of “Free Gaza”: simply add “from Hamas”. It was not necessary. In the well-kept Prenzlauer Berg, the chant of “Bring them home now” echoed into a sleepy Sunday afternoon atmosphere; on the street Unter den Linden there were mainly tourists who got the not quite correct impression that there was solidarity with fellow Jews and concern in Berlin People took to the streets to celebrate democracy: At the same time, thousands gathered at the Brandenburg Gate against the AfD and right-wing extremism.
In front of the invited audience in the James Simon Gallery, which included Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer, Idit Ohel, mother of 22-year-old pianist Alon Ohel, who was abducted from the Nova music festival, stepped forward. The “Yellow Piano” – the color is supposed to represent the light, the sun, which those presumably held in tunnels in Gaza do not see – was her idea.
When she spoke of her son, the eldest of her three children, she began to smile. She talked about how his body constantly moved to an inner melody, how the piano seemed to be a part of him, how he filled the family home with music. “We'll soon run out of time,” she said, placing a large hourglass on the piano.
Igor Levit played the Three Intermezzi op. 117 by Johannes Brahms, the composer called them the “Lullabies of My Pains”. The mother of nineteen-year-old soldier Itay Chen, kidnapped at the Gaza border, ran her fingers lightly over a photo of her son as she listened. Behind her sat the niece of Gadi Moses, 79, kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz. When the last note faded, the hourglass had expired.
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