"Janssen Plan for Peace"

A DARTMOUTH man has discovered a way to pulverize the Iron Curtain. He is not an atomic physicist with a Z bomb, the last letter in explosiveness. He is not a missile researcher capable of producing a projectile flying so much faster than a moon rocket that it will go right through the Iron Curtain leaving an enormous and unpatchable hole.

The discoverer is a musician named Janssen, Dr. Werner Janssen '21 by virtue of an honorary degree awarded him by Dartmouth College in 1934. Music has strange powers to shake iron barriers, as he has observed close to the Iron Curtain and behind it, for he has conducted an orchestra in Riga, Latvia.

The Janssen Pulverization Plan is as simple as a sentence from an Abraham Lincoln speech and as capable of going right to the heart. A number of highly placed persons in Europe and America have reacted jubilantly.

One reason why they have is that the plan does not with naive generosity propose to subsidize Europeans with millions of dollars, the check to be picked up by Uncle Sam and passed on to American taxpayers. Another is that the team is not going to be American exclusively. Too often Europeans insist that Americans are juvenile in their eagerness to become pitcher and batter with bases full and umpire, all at the same time.

The plan is this. An orchestra should be formed from the eighty-odd nations in the United Nations and play concerts everywhere, Poland and Italy, Mexico and Turkey, Australia and Russia, America and Yugoslavia, France and Sweden. The musicians should be chosen by a committee of the world's leading musicians about whose authority and wisdom no one would disagree, regardless of his race, color, or politics. And the pay? Salaries would come out of the treasuries of the various countries in accordance with the number of musicians. And the programs? All composers of the world, ancient and modem, would be represented.

Around, over, and through the Iron Curtain would sound overtures and symphonies, sketches and reveries, marches and waltzes, gavottes and pavans, dirges and epithalamions of all countries, expertly interpreted, superbly played.

The world would move towards a union not only in the shared experience of the listeners to great music but also in the enforced understanding in rehearsals and performances of musicians from different countries playing horn by oboe, flute by bassoon, double bass by cymbal.

From his Munich home Werner Janssen flew into Washington a few months ago and won over hearts and minds to his plan. He talked with Sherman Adams, and from the Adams office went memos and telephone calls to diplomats, linguistic experts, and foreign-office agents. They nodded approval. Werner Janssen talked to Mrs. Rosenberg, and she busied herself in her usual competent fashion behind the scenes. He talked to Governor Herter and found him sympathetic.

The plan which began as a seedling, sprouted, put forth leaves, flourished, and was just about to bud when a frost set in. The frost was a committee with power, which killed it. The finish was not dramatic. The imagined world to be wafted through music back of the Iron Curtain ended neither with a bang nor with a whimper but with an enigmatic no. This part of the story remains unexplained.

It would be comprehensible if Werner Janssen could be dismissed as a mere visionary. His life has been founded on tough, at times almost sordid, realities. The son of a millionaire restaurateur in New York who insisted too adamantly that his son should also say to rich diners "Janssen wants to see you," Werner broke away, earned his livelihood at Dartmouth by waiting on table and playing the piano in the Nugget. But even so by virtue of his dynamic insomnia he wrote musical comedies still remembered by his generation - Heave-Ho with Tom Groves '18 and Oh Doctor! with Gene Markey '18.

In Boston he was not to be found at musical soirees. He played in a sailors dance hall on the water front, in Woolworth's on Boylston Street, and in the Oliver Ditson music store.

But his early struggles need not be expatiated on. Music is the touchstone. One way to measure his immense success is through his firsts: the first native American to conduct the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the first American to conduct an orchestra in Finland and as the first and foremost interpreter of Sibelius to be decorated by the Finnish government as Knight First Class of the Order of the White Rose, the first American conductor to be taken seriously in Europe.

Folders in American newspaper offices are bulging with clippings about Janssen successes in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Rochester, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Portland (Oregon).

Abroad one finds newspaper clippings in a half dozen languages with the same sort of emphasis on Janssen virtuosity and depth, sincerity and flamboyance - Janssen in Rome, Janssen in Bologna, Turin, Vienna, Munich, Budapest, Berlin, Helsingor, Stockholm, and Riga.

This is not to say that he moves about Europe like a cooing dove with an olive branch in his mouth. In Rome Mussolini tried to keep peace with Janssen, winner of the Prix de Rome, when his opera in manuscript, "Manhattan Transfer," dedicated to John Dos Passos, was taken from his apartment. Mussolini put blackshirts on the trail of the manuscript, but it was never located. Hitler found out of what stuff Janssen was made. When Janssen refused to delete from an announced program a composition by the Jewish composer Mendelssohn, Janssen found out of what stuff Hitler was made. Hitler threw Janssen out of Germany.

In musical matters pertaining to Western European culture Janssen is not a Johnny-come-lately. He is a conductor of world renown, freelancing in Europe where he is able to talk to musicians in their own languages, German, French, Italian, and Danish. He is a pianist. He is a composer of musical comedies and motion-picture music. He is a cosmopolitan who has lived close to Europeans in all walks of life for the past quarter of a century.

Werner Janssen, now simply known in Europe as Janssen, has strong feelings about the unity of culture, the solidarity of human feelings, the nobility of man, and the ridiculousness and tragedy of the Iron Curtain which could be pulverized by the tiny baton of a conductor and music played by a United Nations orchestra.

Though a committee has rebuked him with a "No," Janssen still believes that his plan is simple, good, and workable. He has faith that someone eventually will put through the Janssen Plan for Peace. What it will be called or who will put it through, he does not know. And he is big enough not to care.

Werner Janssen '21