Her father, who had died in 1954, was perhaps the greatest orchestral conductor in the history of Western Music.  For many years, Willhelm Furtwängler had been conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, the orchestra which set the standard in world music.  Furtwängler has now been dead for over 50 years;  musicians and critics still can’t agree about him.  Why?  He conducted in front of Adolf Hitler.  Hitler enjoyed music, and particularly German music.  Nothing gave Hitler more pleasure than attending concerts or operas, with German music at the centre.  Furtwängler was his favourite conductor.  And Furtwängler played regularly for the Führer.

The Berlin Phil in the early 1930s had many Jewish musicians playing.  Slowly, silently, they vanished – and Furtwängler kept conducting.  Over 5 million Jews simply disappeared in Germany in the 30s and 40s.  In the 1930s, a number of leading German conductors left Germany, to exile in the USA or elsewhere.  Furtwängler remained, playing, recording, smiling to camera.  Today, his reputation remains in the world of music – as the great interpreter of Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Wagner – and yet many people still cannot bring themselves to believe that someone involved with a regime so defiled could produce music of such transcendence.  Somehow, his daughter’s performance here in Dollar brought back all the debate, all the controversy, all the mixed emotions, and all the memories of a cataclysmic time in the World’s history.  The historian Eric Hobsbawn said that the two world wars of the 20th Century were like two massive earthquakes, two volcanic eruptions physically destroying our world.

Today, we’re here and we’re wearing our poppies;  at 11 am today, the Academy will stop, and will go absolutely silent for two minutes when that bell goes at 11am;  we wear our poppies, and meditate for a short while, with images of wars and loss doubtless filling our minds.  Robert Kappa’s photograph of the Spanish Civil war soldier frozen as he is falling in death is typical of such visual memory. 

Our wars today are different, very different from those in the last century.  The First World War ended 89 years ago:  tanks and aircraft had been used for the first time.  The Second World War ended 62 years ago:  Zyklon B and the Atomic Bomb had been used for the first time.  I do not need to remind you ofl the millions of dead as a result of these wars.  The extraordinary list of names on the Dollar war memorial outside our front door, every name with an individual history, reminds us of the long catalogue of the dead here in Dollar, and onwards throughout the Hillfoots, in central Scotland, in the cities, throughout the UK, through the war graves of northern Europe, and then wider around the world.  Real names, real people, mind-altering shock for families, and entire potentials wiped out.  Each poppy we wear represents a person – and a memory of what Michael Foot called ‘a world in agony’.

It’s always difficult to capture the current mood in remembrance in relation to the past.  Along with last year, however, our TV news screens are completely sated with images of wars – in Afghanistan, in Iraq (with issues there so effectively put across to a different audience in the play Black Watch), not to mention the chaos currently in Pakistan.  Only last night, I finally got through to friends in Pakistan, in Karachi, where 130 people died a few days ago when a suicide bomber struck.  “Don’t worry about us”, I was told, “we’ve seen the bomb and its aftermath only on TV, just like you.  Karachi is no different;  the world goes on;  Inshallah, all will be well”.  I enjoyed a conversation on politics, and even on cricket where the streets of Karachi were filled as Pakistan was rejoicing over defeating India yesterday.  The civil disorder of last week was viewed as a minor event;  the volcanic potential was underplayed.

Today, however, you wear your poppies, and you think of the wars of the twentieth century.  I hope, however, you will think of the realities again:  the horrendous injuries of body and mind which remain for those in the longest of long-term care – soldiers with their eyes and noses blown off by shrapnel, children who have lost limbs in a bombing, the Simon Westons of this world with their skin reshaped after burning and the adults now who suffered through radiation damage after the Second World War.

One time each year, we focus on the heroism of ordinary people, called on to make sacrifices well beyond anything we can begin to contemplate in our sanitised world.  The realities of warfare still exist in our long-term hospitals, in mental institutions and in family care around the world;  the reality of Dollar’s deaths remain listed in bronze under Paulin’s famous statue as a daily reminder.

I’d like to end my words today with some from a soldier’s First World War diary.  I just ask that you in your 11am silence remember the fact that you might well not have been here today without the individual sacrifices of many people, including your own ancestors.

In 1918, Sgt Major Richard Tobin, Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval division wrote in his diary:

            The Armistice came, the day every one of us had dreamed of.  The guns stopped;  the fighting stopped.  Four years of noise and bangs ended in silence.  The killings had stopped.

            We were stunned.  I had been out since 1914.  1914.  I should have been happy.  I was sad.  I thought only of the slaughter, the hardships, the waste and the friends I had lost.

            (From Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Ebury Press 2003).

The day the First World War ended in 1918, our need for remembrance began. 

We close by singing the final three verses of Hymn 611, O God, our help in ages past.

JSR
8.11.07