The Great Gatsby, La Traviata,
The Kaiser in Jerusalem
Shalom Friends,
I encountered these three characters in three interesting performances
which I attended in the past month.
They are such fantastic characters that one wonders if they really
existed. They are certainly real in the sense that one can encounter these types of people in real life.
The Great Gatsby was created by the great American author Scott
Fitzgerald. La Traviata, from Verdi’s opera based on the story, La Dame de Camellias by the great French author Alexander
Dumas. The Kaiser created himself and was such a public figure, travelling to many countries, that one can’t doubt that
he really existed but his grandiose ideas, religious devotion and fantastic constructions gave him an aura of mystical greatness.
The Great Gatsby represents the person who starts out life in
humble poverty and then attains so much wealth that he purchases a heritage of grandeur.
He throws lavish parties in his gigantic mansion in Long Island,
adorned with pictures and regalia of his “ancestors” and so convinces everyone that he grew up in the bosom of
wealthy English high society, was educated at Eton and Oxford and fought heroically
in the great battles of the 1st world war. Whereas he actually grew up in a poverty stricken family in some out
of the way, run down homestead in the middle of America.
His humble past, which he has worked hard to hide, is revealed
by a man who is a true member of an old rich, high society American family, because he’s jealous of Gatsby for falling
in love with his wife. Falling in love is thus the cause of Gatsby’s downfall and
his final shocking undeserved murder.
When I was quite young I saw a version of the movie with Alan
Ladd, my favorite actor, in the part of Gatsby and it made me feel sad, but being young and innocent at the time, I never
understood why I felt so sad. Now, as an adult I saw the movie again, this time with Leonardo di Caprio as Gatsby.
I had another chance to think about Gatsby and what saddened me
in his story. This time I understood that Gatsby was a tragic character. I was
saddened because he didn’t deserve to be murdered; he was a good, positive
character whose weakness was his humanity, who deserved praise and honor for raising himself by his shoestrings and succeeding
to attain decency and wealth, not an inglorious death as a scoundrel.
La Traviata is also a tragic character; she also, starts out at
the bottom of the social ladder, as a hedonistic, high society courtesan, sought after only for her physical pleasures of
parties and flirtations.
Then she gains respectability by a love affair with a gentleman
of the upper class and changes her life to one of gentility, elegance and respectability.
Then her lover’s father asks her to give up all she has
achieved for the sake of preserving the ancient respectability of her lover’s family. Out of devotion to her lover she
agrees and sacrifices her dream which she has worked so hard to attain and returns to the whirl of parties and paramours until
she finally dies in the arms of her lover who, only then, when it’s too late, begins to understand the greatness of
her love and generosity in the great sacrifice she made to save his honor.
I encountered the story of the Kaiser at a tour guide’s
refresher course which I attended, about the visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Jerusalem as the guest of the Turkish Sultan Abdul
Hamid II, in 1898.
We visited 4 buildings that the Kaiser had a hand in constructing;
Augusta Victoria Church and Hospital on Mt. Olives, the Schmidt school and hospice opposite the Damascus Gate, the Lutheran
Church of the Redeemer near the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher and the Domitian Abbey on Mt. Zion.
All of these structures use the most modern building methods and
styles available in Germany at the end of the 19th century. The best architects and artisans of Germany of that time were
specially brought to Jerusalem, sometimes spending several years here to make a thorough study of the locations, such as Robert
Leibnitz, the designer of the Augusta Victoria complex, who called it “a proud symbol of German power and cultural expression.”
In the words of Pastor, Michael
Wohlrab: "No expense nor effort was spared: marble from Italy and a pneumatic action organ built by Sauer of Frankfurt an
der Oder. The bells were cast in Apolda, Germany and were transported by boat from Hamburg to Jaffa. To transport them from
Jaffa, the road to Jerusalem had to be widened and paved." Between 1988 and 1991 the church was restored and now gleams with
new brilliance.
A giant painting of Friedrick
Barbarossa, the legendary German king who lead one of the crusades to the Holy Land in the 12th century, prominently
adorns the centre of the main wall of the great hall.
By this picture and many
others depicting famous Christians in the holy land the Kaiser meant to show all the visitors to the church that he has taken
over the glorious task of protector of the Christian holy places.
In this capacity he invited scholars to carry out research of
the archaeological remains at the various locations of the new structures.
Each structure, therefore was not only a new creation, bringing
honor to Germany as a progressive nation but also as the source of wisdom, revealing and protecting Jerusalem’s Christian
past.
For example the remains beneath the new Church of the Redeemer
were shown, by German scholars, to be clearly of several important ancient structures relating to Jesus and Christianity:
The stones of a plaza showed that there was a market place here
in the time of Jesus. I.E. Jerusalem of the 2nd temple period.
Stones, resembling the stones of the Wailing Wall showed that
Herod had quarried stones for building the 2nd temple from the same hill as Calvary. Thus establishing a connection
between the Temple and Christianity, which relates to an important concept in Christianity that Jesus is the new temple.
An archway, considered to be a part of Constantine’s original
church of the tomb of Jesus was incorporated into the outside of the new church, facing the Via Dolorosa, so that the many
thousands of pilgrims passing here daily see it and witness that the Kaiser is the true reviver of the past glory of Christianity
in Jerusalem..
Columns and various decorated stones of a Crusader church, known
as the church of Mary the Major are also scattered everywhere.
All the new structures, with the exception of the Augusta Victoria
building are built on the site of archaeological remains of Jerusalem.
By preserving, emphasizing and researching these antiquities and
by establishing institutes at the sites themselves for scholars to study the antiquities, the public; tourists and pilgrims
would be able to visit them and learn the history of Christianity in Jerusalem and come to a clear understanding that Jerusalem is the holy city of Christianity.
The fact that all these structures are places of physical and
spiritual healing and that they all occupy prominent location on high hills and near holy places, tells us something about
the Kaiser and his view of the world.
These buildings and many others show that the Kaiser and the German
nation are kind and benevolent, bring solace to suffering mankind in the form of hospitals and churches and beauty and technical
modernity.
They express the idea that the German nation are a sort of redeemer,
coming from the new world of modernity, ready to return to the suffering and dead past in which Jerusalem has been left, to
restore and rejuvenate it and raise it up to beyond the level of it’s now dead, glorious past to the level of the modern
world.
The task of modernity is to repair and reconstruct the old. Modernity
brings benefits to antiquity. The implication is that things are getting better and the present is better than the past and
the future will be even better.
The foolishness of this idea was shown tragically and catastrophically
in the 2nd WW yet this attitude still persists.
Technological nick knacks, like computers, atom bombs and all
the rest don’t give us the right to think we’re better than our ancestors. History has shown us that that is not
the way to salvation, it’s rather the way to disaster.
Our task isn’t to change the world of our ancestors but
to fulfill the ideals they set for us.
