Fremd bin ich eingezogen

I learned of the murder of Renee Good in the air, flying from the Minneapolis airport to JFK en route to Savannah, where my husband and I vacation for a week or so every January. She was murdered while I was in the air. My husband was flying from Minneapolis to DC for work, planning to meet me later in the week.

Vacation.

We were both flying away from our home as our home exploded. Seeking escape. Trying to take a break any reasonable person would think we deserved.

Renee Good will not have any more vacations. Her partner won’t either, really. Nor will her children.

I’m still here. She isn’t.

When I can’t process the world, I often listen to very old music.

Franz Schubert’s Winterreise begins with a man leaving a reality he knows because the reality he knows is intollerable. He had been an interloper but thought the fantasy he discovered might last. For him, the problem is mostly that his girlfriend doesn’t love him anymore (or her family doesn’t), which might not seem like a big deal when considering the destruction of representative democracy or masked men murdering people in the street, but it matters to him.

The poetry is by Wilhelm Müller, but I know it only through Schubert’s music.

Schubert was economical. Every note he wrote meant something. To a strict, serious music theorist, many of his compositional choices seem cheap or lacking. His reputation has been dogged by that kind of criticism, often presented in gendered terms. His music is often considered weak or effiminate by the classical music community, but that community is wrong.

He was angry.

Shocked into apathy upon yet another brutal murder by the hands of authorities in my community, I listened to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sing “Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus/A stranger I arrived, a stranger I depart” (from “Gute Nacht,” the first song of Winterreise) on repeat until I felt I would throw up.

I was in Savannah, Georgia, when my Minnesota home—with its 40-degree temperatures that the brainless Secretary of Homeland Security, a woman from South Dakota and therefore familiar with how snow works, used to justify her goons’ murder of a woman—needed me. Federal agents got stuck in the barely existent snow, apparently. Having been stuck in the snow many, many times in my life, I can promise you none of those stressful situations required me to murder someone. Also, the inch of snowcover in Minneapolis that day wouldn’t require a lot of arm strength. ICE should hit the gym.

But I was in Georgia, so I had no shovel to help those high-testosterone, low-efficacy men out. Good thing they had guns with which to murder women.

Winterreise ends with the saddest, but most empowering moment of revelation I know of in European culture (“Der Leiermann”). Our depressed, kind of pathetic protagonist, a man who revels in self-pity, encounters a man who is actually destitute, homeless, and in danger. The protagonist’s sudden surge of empathy might seem trite, but it is also powerful because it requires the listener to consider their own position. Who is this new character, this homeless, strange, foreign character? Might I not know everything? Might I learn something from someone different from me? The Winterreise protagonist is an incel suddenly discovering the world doesn’t revolve around him (take note, my MAGA boys).

That’s too much musicologizing. It’s innappropriate today. I do this, sometimes, when I can’t find a way to express my emotions fully.

Renee Good is dead.

She was shot at least three times (that I counted based on the videos) by an ICE agent who couldn’t immediately be identified because these impotent warmongers wear masks (he’s been identified now).

My friends and family often talk about living in unprecedented times. It’s understandable. Law enforcement officers murdering civilians is hard to process.

But these times are not unprecedented. In Schubert’s Vienna, people disappeared from the street, never to be seen again. Schubert and his closest friends spent a disproportionate amount of time encountering Klemens von Metternich’s goons given their short lifespans. The Viennese secret police in the 1810s and 1820s didn’t wear masks, as far as I know, but they could still be your next door neighbor without you knowing.

Musicologizing again. I should take a walk.

On his random, pointless trek, Wilhelm Müller’s sad man is accompanied by a crow (“Die Krähe”). It’s disturbing, and the wanderer seems to want the crow to stay with him until it can pick his dead flesh from his body (“lass mich endlich sehn treue bis zum Grabe/let me at last see faithfulness to the grave”).

Alan Menken explicitly stole Schubert’s crow theme when writing the music for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Even though I tell my students that Schubert is my dead boyfriend, the theft doesn’t bother me. The theme, especially played on a spare piano, evokes unreallness, a consciousness that reality has shifted (remember, the Disney prince was “spoiled, selfish, and unkind”). I wish we could have a cartoon ending. We won’t.

Reality has truly shifted.

I’m sure Klemens von Metternich was smiling in Hell as Donald Trump’s secret police shot a woman in the face.

Renee Good is dead. She will not have another vacation, nor will her partner, really, nor her children, really.

Müller and Schubert’s wandering sad-sack does change as he travels. The homeless hurdy-gurdy player makes an impact, and the wanderer seems to want to wander with him. He sees a human without facade and it makes him think a bit about his own experiences.

Last night I saw Kristi Noem, a woman with nothing but facade, lie to the world about something that happened down the street from my workplace.

Renee Good is dead. A man murdered her with the blessing of the leader of the free world. Reality has shifted. Metternich is smiling in Hell. The crow is waiting to pick the flesh off of the corpse of someone, but it will not get to because the crux of Winterreise is that the wanderer, who arrived as a stranger and left as a stranger, learns to love people who are not him. That will never happen while Donald Trump is in power.

Renee Good is dead. A man murdered her. I saw it happen.