Catholic church and Jewish cemetery

Yesterday I bid adieu to the St. Petrus Canisius organ with a few adrenaline-pumping run-throughs of Franck's Grande Pièce Symphonique and Mendelssohn's sixth organ sonata. While the Mendelssohn should transfer decently enough from the 32-register Rieger to the (oh dear) 8-register Walker at my gig back home, the Franck deserves better and has me chomping at the bit to get back into the demo cycle at Duke. Aeolian and Flentrop organs, here I come.

I was sorry that Complainant Number Two didn't show up to kvetch, as I had been looking forward to congratulating her on finally driving me away from the church forever, never to return. But in her place, a soft-spoken older gentleman appeared behind the organ bench and politely inquired about the practice schedule. I referred him to the secretary and regular organist. One Franck and one Mendelssohn later, there he was, sitting in the back of the church. As I left, he said, "that was lovely, really lovely. Are you preparing for a concert? When will you be playing again?" In retrospect, it was probably good that Complainant Number Two wasn't there, as the meeting of matter and anti-matter would have annihilated the sanctuary.

On the way home, I contemplated whether to stop by the Jewish cemetery, a place I hadn't realized I had been driving past four times a week for the past three months until the BZ published an article on the cemetery a few days ago. I was still waffling when I turned on the car radio, and what should be playing but Mahler's "Songs of a Wayfarer" in a chamber arrangement by Arnold Schoenberg. Oy gevalt. I took the hint and parked.

The cemetery is relatively new. Between 1424 and 1806, Jews were prohibited from living in Freiburg. In 1863, changes to Baden's laws finally allowed Freiburg's resident Jews to form a congregation. The cemetery was founded in 1870. It is still used today but is nearing capacity.

The cemetery has a noticeable absence of gravestones marking death dates in the 1940s. There is of course a memorial "to the Jewish victims of the Gewaltherrschaft [tyranny], 1933-1945." But the memorial most interesting to me was "to our fallen sons of the World War, with thankfulness and reverence, 1914-1918." I've seen cross after cross honoring WWI soldiers of various towns, but never paused to think that some of the fallen were left off the lists because they weren't Christian.

Update 22 Dec. 2009: A friend insists that Jews were well enough integrated into German society during WWI that their names would have been included in WWI memorial monuments, even on crosses. So I should have said, it never occurred to me that Jews were fighting for the fatherland alongside Christians during WWI, given what followed in the 1930s.