My second conscient conversation with composer and acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp. The first took place on March 31, 2021 in Vancouver, e22 westerkamp – slowing down through listening, and this second took place on March 17, 2025 in Vancouver BC which is on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.. Hildi is also featured in numerous other episodes of this podcast including 157, 170 and 226. I asked Hildi to focus our conversation on her childhood in post war Germany and how her upbringing has affected her work as an artist and listener. This is especially relevant as authoritarian regimes are unfolding around the world. I think we are well served by listening to our elders who have important stories to tell.
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Hildegard Westerkamp reflects on a childhood shaped by the ruins and lingering fears of post-war Germany, revealing how early exposure to trauma and a deep connection to nature forged her path as an artist and listener. Hear how immigrating to Canada gave her the space to heal and create.
Chapter Summary
00:00 The Activist’s Dilemma
00:47 Childhood Reflections
02:06 The Impact of War
06:05 Rebellion and Reflection
08:05 Finding Creative Freedom
10:01 Art in Times of Crisis
12:50 The Spirit of Resilience
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Behind the Story
Hildegard Westerkamp’s narrative paints a picture of a generation grappling with the unspoken horrors of war and the weight of collective guilt. Her story highlights the importance of acknowledging the past, finding solace in nature, and cultivating inner calm to foster creativity and resilience in the face of ongoing global challenges.
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:00 - 00:00:47] Hildegard Westerkamp
The first thing that comes to mind is my young activist in me that says, of course, let's just fight. Let's just do what we can to speak out against, be revolutionary, be, you know, like we were when we were young in the 60s, 70s. Now I think that my response is to stop and to slow down and to do some deep listening and some meditation and to ground myself because I don't know what to do at this point in time, at all.
[00:00:47 - 00:01:38] Claude Schryer
Episode 225 this is my second conscient conversation with composer and acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp. I asked Hildi to focus our conversation on her childhood in post war Germany and how her upbringing has affected her work as an artist and listener. And I think this is especially relevant today as authoritarian regimes are growing around the world. And I think we're well served by listening to our elders who have when important stories to tell. We were young. Now we've known each other a long time. And I'm in your house here in Vancouver.
It's, you know, May, March 18th or something like that.
[00:01:39 - 00:01:40] Hildegard Westerkamp
Seventeenth.
[00:01:40 - 00:02:06] Claude Schryer
Seventeenth, yeah. Good. And a few times I've been here, you've talked to me about your childhood in post war Germany and I've always been interested in that story and I know you might write about it one day, but I'm wondering if you could talk to me about what's on your mind in and around your childhood and how it's affected your work as an artist and. Yeah, just some thoughts on that.
[00:02:06 - 00:10:45] Hildegard Westerkamp
Yeah. I have been thinking back a lot lately and I also read one excellent book, a German book (Harald Jähner Wolfszeit, English title: Aftermath) about the time of 1945 to 1955, which were the first 10 years of my life. I was born in 1946, so right after the war, a year after the war. And reading that book made me aware of the chaos I grew up in. I wasn't aware of that as a child. I certainly remember walking to schools and seeing ruins and beggars of people who'd lost their legs and arms, selling shoelaces. That was just part of daily life.
I remember seeing the British forces that were in our region with their vehicles, doing their exercises, scaring the hell out of me because their trucks had this terrible whine. And when, when I would hear them, I would just be really, really afraid. It was just these sort of aftermath of war and I hadn't been in the war, but I lived with stories of war and the Nazi times all the time. That was just always there. And so there was this fear. I grew up in a very fairly conservative household with a lot of music. My mother was really into making sure we had music lessons and learned to play classical music, recorders, piano, flute.
And so we played a lot at home. And I loved it. I was the youngest, and, you know, I was always sort of behind on everything, but because I was. I learned quickly and wanted to learn quickly and played with my older siblings eventually. My father was a listener in our house. He enjoyed all that. And he was the one who would make me aware when we went on walks of sounds and sights and the beauty of nature.
And he was really a bit of an environmentalist. He always did anything to make me aware of the beauty of nature. My mom was a gardener, so we were out in the countryside in a village, and my grandparents had a big farm. And so I was always out in the countryside. And I think it was that. That had a very lasting effect on me, in that whatever the family was, which was four older siblings, way older siblings, and two parents who were older, and then there was me. And I would escape out into the garden and the forest and just be on my own there, just getting away from, I think, an inner ambition of trying to keep up with all these adults, these older people.
And that time alone, often alone, sometimes with cousins and playmates, too. We were in a village, and there were enough younger people, too. But in hindsight, it was that connection to the outdoors, to the being in the forest and in the garden, that I think really shaped me. That was the place of calm. And the rest of Germany just scared the hell out of me. In my youth. I was always afraid in school.
There was many, many teachers who were still really authoritarian. There were many, many, what I now know, very damaged people around, adults who had gone through trauma, terrible trauma, and terrible guilt about what had happened. And of course, you have no perspective on that when you're young. But in hindsight, I just see this scenery in front of me almost like a play where I'm just among people or the kids, the children are all among people that are trying to grapple with what the hell just happened in this world and what did we do, what did we not do? It was not spoken much about in the early years, not in the 50s. That started in the 60s and 70s, and I immigrated in 68. So Germany was not yet doing what it did later with trying to grapple publicly with the Holocaust and having museums and opening Auschwitz and all that kind of stuff that just wasn't happening yet at the time.
And the discussions hadn't really Started yet. But we became a rebellious generation who said to the generation, my father's generation, my parents generation, what did you really do in the Nazi time and in the war? And it was a very disturbing question to have in your mind all the time where you couldn't trust that the people that you were with might not have been criminals. And that question just pursued me as a. As a young adult for a really long time. And so over the years, I would have many, many conversations with, particularly my mother after my father had died about all of that. And she had a good memory.
So, you know, I came to Canada with this incredible feeling, oh, my God, now I'm in a country where I can relax, I don't have to. Everybody is so friendly, Nobody judges you. We can experiment with anything. In other words, culturally, in Germany, I was exposed to a lot of culture, to theater, opera, music. We went. My parents exposed me to a lot of that, and I studied some music and the education was such that that I came with a lot over here, German culture, classical culture. But I was not in any way thinking that I would be a creative person myself.
Not at all. I was only scared of that kind of world, actually. So I come to Vancouver and something calms down in me in the way that it calmed down outdoors in Germany, and I suddenly could begin to write. I could start to draw, I could. We were experimenting here with the sort of people at Coop Radio and my then husband, Norbert Wipsad, who was a writer, we developed these creative projects. And suddenly I found this sort of wealth of excitement about what could be done in the world. And maybe that's why I'm saying that in times of crisis, we really need to reach that point of calm, of an open space inside that can be creative, that can be expressive.
Because while you're inside that crisis and you're wrapped up in tension and crisis, it's very hard to be creative. You can fight back. You can be activist fighting back, maybe. But to be deeply creative, to make change on a more profound level, you have to almost distance yourself from the crisis and be in a place of calm and trying to figure out how to get to that. And I feel that this immigration of mine gave me the first few years of this, observing my 10 skins just falling off and falling off and falling off, and then discovering, oh, there's actually something inside here that wants to do something, wants to create. And the activist one came up first.
[00:10:48 - 00:11:11] Claude Schryer
There are so many questions, and I think we'll leave it at questions, because I'm thinking About the resistance and resilience of people during wartime, during fascism, that kind of thing, which is a big, big, big topic. How does one recover? How does one re educate? That's also something you're thinking about at this time in your life and you'll write about it later and share it with us.
[00:11:11 - 00:11:37] Hildegard Westerkamp
What happens to artists in the time of crisis? I mean, when we look at history, you know, in Germany, people try to get away from Germany, the Jewish population, artistic population, ended up in over here, a lot of it. Right. How can you continue to create in that? Can you create in that?
[00:11:38 - 00:12:11] Claude Schryer
Well, I'm told that there are artists, some societies in crisis that need art more than ever. But what kind of art coming from where? And again, these are open ended questions that I'm glad we just had this short chat because it's like touching upon complexities that merit serious reflection and without coming to conclusions and judgment. When I ask that question, what is the role of arts? I don't mean any specific art. I mean really the spirit, the human spirit.
[00:12:11 - 00:14:59] Hildegard Westerkamp
Exactly. I think it's, you know, and I think in those times that's when people get together and not only talk together, but create on a very different level to create opportunities for resilience where you can speak back, where you can act back differently. And that's not necessarily a piece of art, but it's artistic behavior, creative behavior that regenerates energy and positive energy so that we can actually continue living in some sort of way. So in my enthusiasm I would say that activist enthusiasts, I would say we just have to keep going in whatever we are good at and try our best to access those things. And when I mentioned that people in the war times, artists left. Yeah, I think there could be desperate times where you can't work anymore or you need really a lot of help from others to encourage each other. I don't know.
I have never lived in those times. We might be living in this now. And I would be very curious to see how we all react to this, respond to this and what we come up with. The creative spirit, that kind of inner force is I think absolutely necessary to survive these times. And I'm feeling that coming up in Canada. It's kind of nice to feel that. My sense is that we need to be speaking to each other with that kind of groundedness, use our intelligence and use our senses at every moment to figure out what would be best at any moment.
If I think about the future, I probably would feel quite paralyzed. And so for me it's almost like, oh, I need to get some fresh air and go out in the garden and see what needs to be done there. And. Oh, I'm a grandmother. I really want to be here to support that life of my grandkids because these are hard times. How It's a day to day thing, almost.