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SILENCED TO DEATH
PAOLO FERRARINI INTRODUCES THE TRACK TOTGESCHLAGEN TOTGESCHWIEGEN
FROM THE ALBUM PROLEGOMENI A QUALSIASI METAFISICA
I've had the chance to visit several concentration camps in my life, not only Nazi ones.
I've always been captivated and affected by their existence,
possibly because of a subtle awareness that, in a different historical time,
given my wayward openness about my homosexuality,
and my fidgety intolerance to all regimes,
I would have most likely joined the population doomed to extermination in these places.
I first visited Dachau, in particular, back in 2000.
When I found this commemorative slab,
a homage of the Munich LGBT community to the homosexual victims,
it made me think a lot.
Totgeschlagen Totgeschwiegen.
An incredibly powerful and elegant expression
that only a language like German can produce.
Beaten to death, Silenced to death.
I took note of those words, thinking of writing a song at some point.
But it's only an anecdote of a few years later
that made me fully appreciate
the meaning of being "silenced to death".
It was January, the time of the year we remember the victims of the Nazi regime,
and after yet another holocaust play
filled to the brim with bleeding-heart rhetoric on the destiny of the Jewish people,
I asked a childhood friend, who had written and interpreted the piece,
why she hadn't mentioned at all the homosexual victims.
Candidly, she replied that she just had no idea
that homosexuals, too, had died in concentration camps.
I found that statement devastating, because of all it entailed.
It was like suddenly opening my eyes and finding myself surrounded by people
who, at a different time in history, if I had been taken by the Nazis,
would not even have noticed,
or perhaps would have been embarrassed by the incident,
letting me disappear, as it were, in silence.
And what does this mean today?
How is it possible that a person who has never in her life had a single Jewish friend,
cries her heart out for the destiny of those people,
while ignoring completely the identical historical heritage
of a friend she has grown up with?
This ignorance stinks of cultural censorship,
a sad clue that the heavy lesson of that dreadful tragedy
has in fact not been fully understood, let alone learnt.
This is also the reason why, unfortunately, being gay, even in modern Western societies,
can still turn into a mental concentration camp
where the silence of parents, schools, friends, can still kill,
leading in particular the most fragile teenagers to desperation
and, as we know, literally to their death.
This is case of the boy I gave voice to in my song.
Other than that, the song is an abstract, wordless painting,
because there is no verb or noun that does not trivialise the gravity of those events
and the burnt and tormented lives of yesterday, and today, too.