When the priest finished, a palpable sense of relief swept through the crowd. His words had brought no one peace—penance, forgiveness, justice, sin—these were still papery abstractions that could not begin to address the everyday realities of their lives.

Then the orchestra musicians took their places on chairs brought from their own homes and began tuning their instruments. Where had they managed to hide these over the past years? It seemed a miracle that the war would have spared anything so delicate as a harp or violin. When all were ready, the church fell silent. The bundled forms onstage sat poised with bows raised, breaths held. And the conductor, a small man wearing a battered felt hat, raised his baton. The stillness intensified, and the silence had a particular starving quality. This was why the people were here. To hear music. It had been so long.

At once, the conductor jerked his baton upward and the orchestra gathered itself and dove in. The music, Beethoven’s Ninth, opened with a blast: violins, trumpet, an explosion loud enough to knock thought and worry from the mind. It was reminiscent of war—thundering footsteps, the rumble of tanks, the screech and crack of airplanes overhead, an exploding bomb. The audience sat at attention, gripping their seats. Something small and gentle might have lost them. Something tender and they might have begun to cry and never stopped. They were there, but they were not strong. They would do anything to protect themselves from sadness.

Martin was swept up in the sound—no longer blood and bone, frozen feet and hungry belly, but an empty vessel filling with notes, carried by something older and bigger and more permanent than himself. This music had been played and heard before and would be again, not only here in this church, but in places all over the world, by people living in different circumstances and different times. These musicians and this audience were allowed, for a fleeting instant, to climb on its back.

When it was over, no one spoke. The clapping faded, and the church was once again jammed with clumsy shuffling and cold. Frozen fingered, one of the violinists dropped his bow. An icicle of snot hung from the conductor’s nose.

But leaving the church, they found the night was blacker, the stars brighter, the outline of fence, roof, and road clearer and more beautiful—and the people’s faces looked oddly exposed.

In the future, Martin will recall this night as the first time—and one of the only times—he ever saw Germans crying in public, not at the news of a dead loved one or at the sight of their bombed home, and not in physical pain, but from spontaneous emotion. For this brief time, they were not hiding from one another, wearing their masks of cold and practical detachment. The music stirred the hardened sediment of their memory, chafed against layers of horror and shame, and offered a rare solace in their shared anger, grief, and guilt.

Years later, as a professor, Martin would try to find the words to articulate the power of togetherness in a world where togetherness had been corrupted—and to explore the effect of the music, the surprising lengths the people had gone to to hear it and to play it, as evidence that music, and art in general, are basic requirements of the human soul. Not a luxury but a compulsion. He will think of it every time he goes to a museum or a concert or a play with a long line of people waiting to get inside.