Bach Festival in Köthen: Music history meets AfD success

A visit to the Bach Festival in Köthen takes you directly to a city between music history and contemporary politics. The author first describes his rather relaxed relationship with Bach and then explains that, in addition to the festival, he was also interested in the strong AfD result in Köthen, where the party was even higher than the national figure at 45.9 percent. He then connects the city with its past and refers to the entry “the Bachin” in the church register as well as to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” whose title he interprets as a contrast to the heated political situation. He then takes up Köthen's reputation as the "world capital of homeopathy" and hopes that the AfD could ultimately prove to be as ineffective as Hahnemann's sugar balls. At the end he dampens this optimism again and concludes with the warning that the election result could only be a sign, in keeping with the song title “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”.

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Last weekend we were at the Bach Festival in Köthen. Not that I know much about Bach. Johann Sebastian, the composer, is hardly closer to me than Patrick, the actor, Vivi, the singer, or Richard, the writer. However, he is closer to me than Thomas, the ex-IOC president. We were also in Köthen because I always wanted to start a text with the sentence “Last weekend we were at the Bach Festival” – that sounds so ZEIT-like. But it was also about the music. And also because Köthen is in Saxony-Anhalt and was just elected there.