The Internationale

A Revolução Russa completou um centenário e foi objeto de uma das sessão culturais de nossa Academia

The Missing Music of the Left

Todd Gitlin

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Children singing “The Internationale” in a communist-led May Day parade, Paris, France, 1934

In 1962, my Harvard social science teacher, Michael Walzer, mentioned in passing, in the run-up to a classroom discussion about the preconditions of the Nazi ascendancy, that one reason the 1918–1919 German revolution—a short-lived sequel to the collapse of the Kaiser’s regime—was doomed was that it did not have a song. Though he recently told me that he doesn’t remember uttering these words, they have stayed with me. I take him to have been referring not to a specifically musical deficiency, but to a more sweeping cultural one—the absence of an animating spirit that crosses boundaries with panache. Such a spirit may be the Holy Grail that idealists seek./.../