Cologne Opera House during Otto Klemperer's tenure
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Werner Klemperer was born 22 March, 1920 to the soprano Johanna née Geisler and the conductor Otto Klemperer, in Köln (Cologne) in the Weimar Republik. "Weimar Republik" was the name of the bold experiment in self-transformation by which Germany was then known. Otto Klemperer was the name of one its leading transforming forces. He was already a dominant figure in Köln's cultural life by the time of his son's birth. Seven years later he was put in charge of Berlin's foremost landmark and Weimar's most prominent symbol, the Kroll Operahouse, popularly known as "Klemperer's Kroll."
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When your father's a musical institution, music is your mother-tongue. There were piano lessons with Karl Ulrich Schnabel (son of Artur), trumpet and violin lessons (the latter, briefly, with Hindemith); visitors to the house of the likes of Kurt Weill and Stravinsky; and study, always study.
A highlight was a rehearsal of Falstaff which Werner was allowed to attend. It so impressed him that in later years, when feeling out of sorts, he need only hear a recording for his good humor to return. But such diversions were rare for Werner and his younger sister Lotte, who were never permitted to attend an actual Kroll performance. "You know, there was obviously a little activity in Berlin," he recalled some years later, "but we weren't allowed to participate."
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Considering the nature of that activity—Werner's main recollection was of young SA men running around throwing bricks into store windows—that was probably just as well. Berlin's Golden Twenties sprang from a battleground where Europe's extremes collided. It was the focal point where the very best and the very worst coexisted; poverty and resplendence, decadence and transcendence, all were side-by-side. |
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In the center of this music-centric culture was the Kroll; at its center, Otto Klemperer. He was a Jewish-born Catholic in whose work (and self) seemingly irreconcilable opposites—including tradition and innovation, music and drama—were united by his
commanding vision and iron will. He strove to be a unifying force. Instead he succeeded in polarizing the city still further. While the leading lights of Europe extolled him, the brownshirts threatened his life.
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 Ordinarily, altar boys don't experience bar mitvehs. But Werner's 13th birthday was marked by a rite of passage resulting from his Jewish heritage nonetheless. By March, 1933, Otto Klemperer had already endured the closing of the Kroll and at least two attempts on his life (including a fall into the orchestra pit which left him unconscious when a railing "accidentally" gave way). On 23 March, Klemperer's Kroll became Hitler's headquarters; Berlin's bastion of artistic freedom was the site where the Enabling Act was signed which took all freedoms away. When a prominent physician mysteriously "disappeared" for no reason other than being Jewish, Otto Klemperer realized the full danger of his and his family's situation. Soon after he departed for Switzerland, where his family quickly joined him with only the possessions they could inconspicuously carry away.
 Vienna extended the exiles so royal a welcome that the apartment in Schönbrunn Palace once occupied by the Duke of Reichstadt, Napoleon and Archduchess Maria Louise's son, became their new home. Then in June 1935 the family moved to Los Angeles, where Otto Klemperer and other German expatriates were once more creating an era which would be forever remembered as golden.
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