When do I shut up?

How does a writer, artist, musician, or film director survive physically and spiritually within a repressive society? In a totalitarian or Fascist regime? And finally, when great art, music, books, are even architecture is created with the approval, support, and even use of enforced labor to create such works within such regimes, what is THIS art – and what is our relationship to THIS art wrought from suffering? Do we boycott the pyramids and the Taj Mahal?

I’m asking these questions today, partly as a culmination of reading about Paris during the German World War II occupation in The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War by Herbert R. Lottman. 288 pages. Houghton Mifflin Co 1982.

Perhaps there is no worse subject to bring up at a dinner table than the subject of collaboration during World War II. If you are extremely patient, those that did live during the war years will tell you of their experiences – and there is nothing that can substitute for the words of a person who lived through those times. If you haven’t lived through those times, see “The Lives of Others.” Even if it’s about a completely different time period (East Berlin in 1984) it has plenty to say about living in a repressive society.

The Academy award-winning film, “The Lives of Others” with Ulrich Muhe zeroes in on the dilemma of the creative mind. What if the repression in which you live endures a lifetime? Suicide or escape to a less repressive society is the only answer. Some will choose to ‘shut up and sing.’ And then there are the very few who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by risking outright defiance. These are the difficult choices in life.