Can Art ever Claim to Be Above Politics? Taking Sides and Collaboration by Ronald Harwood

Taking Sides, a 1995 play by British playwright Ronald Harwood, reconstructs the American investigations, during the post-war United States denazification, of the German conductor and composer Wilhelm Furtwängler on charges of having served the Nazi regime. In Collaboration (2008) Harwood dramatizes the artistic cooperation between Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig on the opera The Silent Woman, the political circumstances and repercussions of its première in Dresden and the composer’s involvement with Hitler’s regime. Considering the similarity of the issues raised by these works, the essay aims to examine, in an historical-juridical perspective, the two dramas as if they were one with the same subject: the fatal confrontation between culture and power and between freedom and compromise.