Membership number 1,607,525

Herbert von Karajan, a prominent orchestra conductor, and son of an upper-bourgeois Salzburg family, originally Aromanian, was undoubtedly a musical genius. At the age of only 27 he was appointed Germany's youngest Generalmusikdirektor and was a guest conductor in Bucharest (that would be Romania, not Hungary), Brussels, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Paris. He was known as the most popular orchestra conductor of all times, and he sold over 200 million copies.

Yet in this wunderkinder’s perfect biography there is a glitch. Karajan was a member of the Nazi Party. He joined the party on 8 April 1933; his membership number was 1,607,525.

Should his political appurtenance and youth credo in Sozialismus shade his creative talent? Does it say anything about his character as a human being? About his morality? It certainly does. Can we have double standards and separate our enjoyment for music, art and literature from the man that created it? Isn't this hypocrisy and indirect endorsement of their personal life choices?

Pope Benedict XVI was also a member of Hitler Youth party. At the time it was mandatory. It is no secret about the coercive methods of authoritarian regimes: if you were not with them, you were against them.

Some however joined out of sheer belief in a new era. They believed in change, even if the course of history got out of hand and change proved to be atrocious. They thought that evolution meant revolution. I do, too.

“I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others. I lost at cards, wasted the substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, and murder, all were committed by me, not one crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by my equals to be a comparatively moral man. Such was my life for ten years”. These were the words of Tolstoy.

Like so many others, Tolstoy remained in the collective conscience as a great writer and philosopher. His private life and the allegations of rape of an underage girl remain forgotten, just brought up any now and then by some exasperate literature teacher to awake the interest of vexed 15 year olds who are busy sending text messages about 50 Cent and Pittbull. Like this teacher totally sucks, y’all, but that Tolstoy dude was like totally awesome. I am like totally floored. Word, sweet!

Michael Jackson has died. Like all obituaries, such hearsay makes us reflect about what immortality really is.

Because one of our contemporary brilliant minds (Milan Kundera that is) has a novel with a similar name, I tried to look up for synonyms of endless life and I came across this one: athanasia, a lovely female name, of Greek origin, also meaning immortal, deathless. As opposed to its twin, euthanasia, which implies a good death, athanasia gave birth to a Christian creed in the 15th century and claims, in spite of all church’s documents and decrees, that thanatos can be conquered and incarnation, recte immortality, is possible.

You might honestly wonder how I can mix up Karajan, the Pope, Michael Jackson, Tolstoy and Church in the same literary pot. It is rather easy, believe me, as the main theme here is immortality and ways to achieve it.

Like Tolstoy, Michael Jackson was accused and acquitted of child sexual abuse, although at the time the media were unfriendly to him and tended to give moral credit to the child, whose name will, as well, remain immortal. We are not here to judge whether Karajan was a Nazi, Jackson was a pedophile, Tolstoy was a rapist, Schopenhauer a violent manic-depressive with his oddities and anxieties and his gun hidden under the pillow, and his lawsuits for battering older women, Nietzsche was a drug addict, whose writings were heavily chloral hydrated or Rimbaud an alcoholic addicted to absinthe.

We should not judge the men, but their legacy. But can we separate them?

What is immortality? Does being morally virtuous insure one a place in the history book? No, it certainly doesn’t. Lee Harvey Oswald, Robert Oppenheimer, Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper are spending their eternity in the same room with Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Jesus or Prophet Mohammad. For those who are dying to believe in a postmortem justice, such as heaven and hell, things are quite obvious: to the right go Gandhi, Jesus & co., and to the left go Adolf, Oswald and Jack.

Where do Michael Jackson and Karajan go? They won fair and square their right to immortality and their moral innocence wasn’t proven to have been defiled. Their admirers’ blind and unconditional love saved them a place in the Book of the Dead. Is the love of others the answer for our absolution? Wasn’t self redemption that did that?

No matter how dubious their personal lives were, in the end what stays with us, the ordinary populace, is their legacy, and the emotions they created.

For it is true, we will forget what they said and will forget what they did, but we will never forget how they made us feel: happy, angry, sad, scared, surprised, disgusted or just disappointed.