Mischlinge Exposé: A Concert with Classical Pianist Carolyn Enger

As a musician with German-Jewish origins, Carolyn is deeply interested in exploring the history of assimilation and conversion behind the Mischlinge and bringing to life the stories of people like her father and godmother with music, art, literature, and film. Carolyn’s Mischlinge Exposé weaves a multimedia tapestry around a little-known aspect of the Holocaust: the Mischlinge (a derogatory Nazi term for those neither fully Jewish nor fully Aryan). Interweaving video and audio testimony from Carolyn’s godmother and her father (both labeled Mischling, Grade A by the Nazis), with the music of composers from the salon period who converted to Christianity in the decades before the war, and works reacting to questions of identity after the war, the program vividly illustrates what it was like to be between worlds in Germany in the first half of the 20th century.