‘72 Auto Crash Haunts Masur

As Kurt Masur prepares to take up the directorship of the New York Philharmonic next fall, a long-buried tragedy has returned to haunt him.

At issue is whether the former communist regime covered up Masur’s responsibility for a 1972 car crash in which he was injured and three people were killed, including his second wife, Irmgard, 34.

The accident was dredged up after anonymous tipsters, alleging that Masur had been drunk, asked the Public Prosecutor’s Office to start a reinvestigation. The request was reported in the German press and then by New York Newsday.

Officials say they have no plans to reopen the case, in which Masur’s Mercedes reportedly crossed a highway median strip and plowed into a Trabant automobile carrying two men, 23 and 33, about 10 miles south of Berlin.

In a telephone interview from Leipzig, Masur said he had not been drinking and had passed an alcohol test at the scene but had been under great stress at the time of the crash, which his daughter Caroline, then 4, survived.

“The decision of the prosecutor’s office, as it was told to me, was that that I had been punished enough by the death of my wife,” said Masur, who was hospitalized with seven broken ribs and a fractured back.

But relatives of the dead men said the government was and is shielding Masur, who began touring the West in the mid-’60s and has been a source of much-needed hard currency. In the fall of 1989 he became a national hero by appealing to communist officials for nonviolence just before a Leipzig demonstration, possibly preventing a German version of the Tian An Men Square massacre. He was even touted as a candidate for president.

One of the victim’s mothers said that at the time of the accident government officials warned the relatives not to pursue a complaint against Masur. Instead, they were given a new Trabant, which East Germans typically had to wait 15 years to buy. Documents show Masur’s state liability insurance paid all damages, including $2.95 for a burial shroud for the 23-year-old.

Masur said a prosecutor assured him that the 1972 accident had been properly handled.

He declined to clarify how the accident happened, although police say he nodded off and veered into traffic.

“There was no reason at all,” he said of the accident’s cause. “It happened. Of course, I was stressed in that time. I led two major orchestras (East Berlin and Leipzig). And still today there is no marking between the two parts of this street--if we would have the lines in between, then this never would have happened.”