Everyone knows the maxim that blood is thicker than water. On the most superficial level, this is entirely true; I had a nasty shaving accident last week and am still trying to get the blood out of the towel. With my luck, one of my neighbors—probably the Californian lady who’d never seen anybody hanging laundry out to dry—will report a massacre to the police.

But if water washes away the sands of time, blood has no effect. I received a rather unpleasant email last night, and I’m still reeling from it.

Last night I listened to a homegrown CD that a friend made; it was compiled with me in mind, and featured mostly German dance bands from the ‘20s and ‘30s—“Schlage aus dem 20er u. 30er”, if you will. There were a lot of delightful numbers, including a few German versions of some American favorites, but I was most delighted to hear one of my own favorites from Berlin. This lovely little number, “Eilali, Eilali, Eilala” was fairly popular in its day, but the most famous recording was made by the renowned “Comedian Harmonists” backed up by the stylish orchestra of Dajos Bela.

There’s nothing special to the song; the lyrics are sort of silly and the music is just a happy and frantic melody. It’s fun, though, and I like it. It’s the sort of song that always makes you smile. I’ve loved it since the first time I heard it about four years ago, and having just heard it again, I decided to go on a search for the sheet music so that I could butcher the song at my parlor piano.

And so I posted a message on one of the boards that I frequent; one that focuses on dance music and operettas and that sort of thing, just asking for the music to this little dance tune.

Within half an hour, I got an email entitled “Eilali”. I opened the email to receive the message:

“People like you are the ones who dance on the graves of millions of innocents.”

I was a bit shocked, to say the least, but I had the presence of mind to respond:

“I’m sorry if I didn’t receive your message in time. I am polishing my dancing shoes for the big show at the Kabarett-Metropol tonight.”

Whoever this idiot might have been, he obviously overlooked a couple of important points. “Eilali” was a hit for the Comedian Harmonists—a sextette of whom fully half were Jewish. The orchestra which accompanied them was mostly Hungarian, another ethnic group not particularly beloved by National Socialism. Therefore, it’s fairly safe to assume that this innocuous fox-trot was not a tool of Satan, or at least not in the incarnation of Hitler’s Reich.

Attitudes such as these are perhaps the most dangerous of modern society. The implication here is that anything German is bad, particularly anything German from the early ‘30s. Had the anonymous emailer done his homework, he’d know that the artists involved were probably more to his liking than he’d thought.

This very assumption of inherent evil is the path that led National Socialism to power in the first place, and has been responsible for countless other purges and holocausts over the centuries of human history.

As convenient as it might be for me to hold up the combined banners of Austria and Germany and declare enmity towards Russia, France and England—perhaps my native United States—it is high time that the civilised peoples of the world transcend the kind of pettiness that results in spitting matches over a dance tune.

I hope that I can get the sheet music to “Eilali, Eilali, Eilala”, because it’s a really happy little song. If I can find it, I will play it for all of my friends at New Year’s, and I think that everyone will enjoy it. The New Years crowd tends to involve a wide variety of religions and ethnicities, and it has been my observation that champagne and happy music dilute both blood and water.