Why Bard College’s orchestra performed Mendelssohn at the site of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies

Leon Botstein, Bard College president and director of its orchestra, leads a concert in Nuremberg, Germany, May 8, 2025. Photo by Anton Doppelbauer

(JTA) — NUREMBERG, Germany — On a spring evening in Nuremberg, an orchestra of New York students gathered for a concert celebrating 80 years since the end of World War II. They also came with a peace mission.

Bard College’s The Orchestra Now, or TŌN, was invited by the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra and made its first overseas trip for the concert on May 8. At the hour of Germany’s surrender in 1945, they performed a program by Felix Mendelssohn — whose music was banned under the Nazis because of his Jewish heritage — in Nuremberg’s Congress Hall, once the site of Hitler’s massive rallies.

The music closed with “Verleih uns Frieden,” or “Grant Us Peace,” a pleading choral piece using a prayer by Martin Luther that was also the concert’s title. (Nazi definitions notwithstanding, Mendelssohn was converted into Protestantism as a child and became a prominent composer of church music.)

For Leon Botstein, the president of Bard since 1975 and TŌN’s founder and conductor, the night was more than a commemoration.

He conceived this concert years ago to celebrate international peace, the historic alliance between the United States and Europe and the anniversary of a victory against intolerance and censorship. But Botstein found himself traveling to Germany as wars with global ramifications expanded in the Middle East and Europe, and as the U.S. government intervened in free expression at home.

Three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and almost two years into Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, both conflagrations have reached new heights. Russia is intensifying its pounding of Ukraine, with June seeing the highest civilian casualties in three years. In Gaza, which Israel’s offensive has largely reduced to rubble, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to access aid since May, according to the U.N. human rights office, and aid groups are warning of mass starvation.

Bonds between the United States and Europe, which Botstein planned to honor, have also frayed. The second Trump administration has shown hostility to European allies, sidelined Europe’s diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East and flip-flopped on support for Ukraine. (It’s now back on Ukraine’s side.)

Meanwhile, Botstein was watching the Trump administration’s moves to control the ideological tilt of universities, cultural institutions and the press in the United States.

Beyond the walls of the Congress Hall, a new world order was rapidly taking shape. Inside, Boststein addressed the crowd as a cultural messenger, promising a transatlantic partnership from within American music halls and universities.

“This concert is a sign that American citizens, although they freely elected our government, remain committed to the core beliefs that define a democracy,” Botstein said in his speech in German. “And that we, as people and artists, will prevail against autocracy and intolerance, that we will uphold our traditional alliance with Europe, which began 80 years ago, and that we will also defend Ukraine.”

He was interrupted by a swell of applause from the audience, which included Nuremberg’s mayor Markus König, former President of Germany Christian Wulff and the mayor of Kharkiv, Nuremberg’s sister city in Ukraine, Ihor Terekhov.

After threatening to abandon support for Ukraine’s defense just weeks ago, Trump has resumed weapons shipments while the country fends off Russia’s largest drone attacks of the war. His unpredictable foreign policy has left European leaders whiplashed and questioning the reliability of the United States as an ally.

Against this chaotic backdrop, Botstein arrived in Europe as an ambassador of cultural alliance — one rooted not in the changeable geopolitical reactions of the Trump administration, but in the longstanding foundations of history and music.

His own life is a story of cultural exchange built from the ashes of war. Botstein was born in Zurich in 1946 to Polish-Russian Jews who survived the Holocaust, arriving in the United States in 1949 as a stateless person. Trained in history and musicology, he became Bard’s president at 29 — his second stint as a college president, after leading the experimental and now-defunct Franconia College at age 23 — and steadily raised the school’s prestige as a home for the arts over the next five decades.

He has also left a footprint on Israelis and Palestinians. Along with serving as music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra from 2003 to 2011, Botstein formed a 16-year partnership between Bard College and Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem. The Bard programs, which train Palestinian liberal arts students and high school teachers, have withstood the Israel-Hamas War.

Botstein has built his music career on advocating for ignored artists, from Jewish musicians whose work was erased by the Nazis to Palestinian students in the West Bank to incarcerated people who are educated through the Bard Prison Initiative.

“Partly because of growing up in the family I did, I found myself defending the unfairly forgotten,” Boststein said in an interview. “I was determined that erasure is ethically wrong and artistically wrong. It definitely had something to do with being part of a family that, through storytelling, kept alive a world that had been obliterated.”

Olivia Chaikin, a 24-year-old flutist in TŌN who is Jewish, said it felt “monumental” to perform Mendelssohn’s music that was outlawed by the Nazis in the very place where millions of people cheered Hitler’s ambitions. She also said she saw a direct line between the banning of Mendelssohn and the Trump administration’s moves to control cultural production at home.

“In the United States, it’s a very relevant topic right now, because of our president’s takeover of the Kennedy Center,” said Chaikin.

The Congress Hall’s burdened past has drawn disputes before. One of the largest Nazi projects still standing, the sprawling, colosseum-style compound was immortalized in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films. During the 1960s, the city of Nuremberg considered tearing it down, according to Lucius A. Hemmer, director of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra.

“It was impossible,” said Hemmer. “It has a grounding of concrete columns into the earth, in the size of 200 by 200 meters. So at that time, the transformation started.”

In 1963, the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra moved in. The building has since grown as a cultural hub and is currently adding a permanent home for the Nuremberg State Theatre.

Since 2001, one segment has housed a Documentation Center dedicated to sharing the history of the site. Still, some historians object to reincarnating a place so central to Nazism as a cultural venue for pleasure. Michael Steinberg, a professor of history and music at Brown University, said that controversy goes back to 1945, when Germany was littered with Nazi ruins. Germans are still debating what to do with them.

“It’s clearly very aggressive, in a way, to place these cultural institutions within this enormous building in this kind of dream fascist architecture,” said Steinberg. “But it also means that the past is in your face, and that people going there have to deal with it, so it’s really a question of how that’s handled.”

Botstein said he sides with repurposing the building so that it can house events like TŌN’s concert. He hoped to show a kind of commemoration that doesn’t just remember the past, but also reminds people what they might lose by forgetting it.

“We live in a time of disinformation, misinformation and a tremendous ability to convince people of what they want to believe,” he said. “The Germans wanted to believe that Jews were unable to be creative and original, and they criticized Mendelssohn’s music as being superficial. I wanted to show that this prejudice can blind people from seeing — or hearing — what’s out there.”