Concert Lecture: Bert Natter and Marcel Worms

Writer Bert Natter and pianist Marcel Worms present a literary concert around the novel "At the End of the War" (2025), whose translation rights have been sold to the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Poland.

The novel follows Karl Zehlendorf, deputy commander of a concentration camp and former aspiring concert pianist. On April 20, 1945 - what will turn out to be Adolf Hitler's last birthday - he plays Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique for the officers gathered in the banquet hall. Then he receives news that his eleven-year-old son Ernst is missing. His search begins as Russian troops are already advancing to dismantle the camp.

During the concert, Natter reads passages and discusses the creation and historical background of the novel. Worms performs the music that comes up: Beethoven's Pathétique, one of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, and Liszt's arrangement of Wagner's Isolde's Liebestod. Natter and Worms also reflect on the work of two Jewish composers persecuted and murdered by the Nazis: Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) and Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944).