Potter_What_is_Nazi_Music.pdf

8/14/2019 Potter_What_is_Nazi_Music.pdf

1/29

doi:10 1093/musqtl/gdi019 88:428455

The Twentieth Century and Beyond andInstitutions, Technology,and Economics

What Is Nazi Music?

Pamela M. Potter

Whenever the words Nazi and music are uttered in the same breath,they are likely to conjure up images of goose-stepping troops stomping to

military marches, fight songs sung to torch-lit processions, Hitler kissingthe hand of Winifred Wagner, or swastika-decked concert halls featuringthe neo-Romantic kitsch of forgotten composers. One may also knowabout the propaganda campaigns touting the virtues of folksong and the

great German masters while vilifying jazz, Jews, and atonality, most bla-tantly displayed in the notorious Degenerate Music exhibit of 1938. Thesetimeless images, emblazoned on the book jackets and CD liner notes of

nearly every encounter with music in the Third Reich, have left the indel-ible impression that the National Socialist regime tolerated its own offi-cially sanctioned Nazi music and aggressively suppressed everything else.

In a recent study on art in the Third Reich, historian JoanClinefelter asserted that the term Nazi art was rarely used during the

Hitler years; rather, artists, critics, and scholars strove to identify andprivilege German art.1Surprising as it may seem, the same was true ofmusic. Rather than invoking Nazi music or any term remotely approxi-

mating it, policymakers, composers, and musicians all shared in the mis-sion to cultivate German music. As Bernd Sponheuer has shown,what the National Socialists were interested inas in their music policy

in generalwas not the development of their original concepts . . .[Hans Joachim Mosers 1938 summation about the nature of German

music] contains no single idea that one could designate specifically asNational Socialist.2Nazi music is, instead, an amorphous concept thatsince the end of World War II has hovered over our general understand-ing of the history of German music in the twentieth century. It implies

certain assumptions about who created music in the Third Reich, theconditions under which it was produced, and the quality of that music.Put simply, these assumptions hold that 1) a group of Nazi composers

and musicians flourished in the Third Reich; 2) they worked under therepressive conditions of the Nazi dictatorship; and 3) the musical


2/29

What Is Nazi Music? 429

products of the Third Reich, which upheld the tenets of Nazi ideology,

were artistically inferior.

At the core of the concept of Nazi music is the pervasive inclinationto isolate the Nazi phenomenon from all other episodes in German his-

tory. If one designates the Weimar Republic as the golden twenties onone end and the year 1945 as the zero hour on the other, the Nazi periodcan easily be cordoned off as a historical anomaly. This tendency is under-

standable, too, for it sidesteps a particularly vexing paradox of Germancultural history. At the risk of stating the obvious, we cannot escape thegeneral consensus that the Third Reich was perhaps the greatest tragedy

of the twentieth century, but not only because of the sheer numbers killedor the degrees of cruelty inflicted, rather also because of the unnerving

paradox that the German bearers of culturea people who had enrichedthe Western world with their literature, science, philosophy, and musiccould be led to commit such barbarous acts.

Yet cultural lifeand musical life perhaps above allcontinued to

operate, even to flourish, in some sectors. Adherence to the concept ofNazi music has unfortunately obscured that perspective and, in theprocess, created gaps in our understanding by virtually excising an entire

chapter of German music history. A scan of the textbooks most widelyused in twentieth-century survey courses gives the impression thatGerman music inaugurated the century with the Second Viennese School,

proceeded to the New Objectivity experiments of the 1920s, and thenmoved into exile with the victims of National Socialism. The canon thus

privileges the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern,Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, and Ernst Krenek (with Carl Orff as the lonerepresentative of those who stayed in Germany, and the dodecaphonist

Josef Matthias Hauer as the lone Austrian),3but otherwise ignores anymusic that might have been produced within Germanys borders between1933 and 1945. The works of successful composers in the Third Reich

have, for better or worse, missed out on the chance to be considered for

inclusion in the canon, and have for the most part fallen into oblivion.4

In what follows, I will examine how assumptions about Nazi music con-

tinue to rest on outmoded ways of thinking about the Third Reich that dateback as far as 1945, with the inauguration of the ill-fated Allied program ofdenazification and the early postwar zero-hour mentality. In the western

zones of occupation, later the Federal Republic of Germany (discussions ofmusic and musicians in Nazi Germany were virtually off-limits for much ofthe forty-year existence of the German Democratic Republic), any full con-

frontations with the Nazi past had to wait until the 1970s, by which timegeneral historians had questioned several assumptions that music historians

nevertheless embraced. As a result, to this day discussions of music in Nazi


3/29

430 The Musical Quarterly

Germany often gravitate toward fulfilling the denazification-inspired task of

determining the guilt or innocence of individual musicians and composers,

and answering zero-hour-inspired questions about the degrees to which theNazis, and even Adolf Hitler himself, acted to suppress certain types of music

and promote others. Liberating ourselves from the concept of Nazi music hasthe potential to bring German culture out of this period out of isolation, lead-ing to a more nuanced understanding of music of the 1930s and 1940s and

the history of musical modernism within and beyond Germany. The seemingoxymoron of Nazi culture (and musics central role in it), difficult as it maybe to comprehend, is all the more important to deconstruct and analyze

because it holds keys to understanding how societies we regard as advancedand educated can so readily succumb to fear and xenophobia.

The Legacy of Denazification

One of the central achievements of the new musicology has been to throw acritical light on the nineteenth-century cult of genius that privileged a com-

poser-centered methodology. The concept of Nazi music, however, still restsvery much on a composer-centered foundation, and attempts to write thehistory of music in the Third Reich have been focused largely on reconstruct-

ing the political roles of individuals and determining their guilt or innocence.

These investigations have, in a sense, carried on the unfinished business ofthe seriously flawed Allied programs of denazification and re-education thatended abruptly and inconclusively in 1948. These programs differed from anyother war settlement, going beyond demilitarization, the payment of repara-

tions, and even punishment for war crimes. The Allies assumed the ambi-tious goal of eradicating all traces of Nazism, rooting out the fundamentalconditions of German life which have made her a recurring menace to the

peace of the world.5Following mass arrests and the immediate release of theleast suspect, all Germans over the age of eighteen were required to fill outquestionnaires to determine the degree of their involvement in the Nazi

party and other organizations and activities. Initially the Allies used thisinformation to draw up blackgraywhite lists in 1945. In the early monthsof 1946, the process was turned over to German tribunals (Spruchkammern),which added the slightly more refined categories of major offenders, offend-ers, lesser offenders, followers, and guiltless.6Punishments could includeimprisonment, forced labor, loss of employment, loss of property, and fines.7

In the music world, those who presumably aided the Nazi governmentcame under especially close scrutiny at first, but were given far moreleeway once jurisdiction was transferred to the Spruchkammernand the

completion of the denazification process was hastened. Under the American


4/29


occupation, for example, German musicians and composers initially were

not only investigated for membership in the National Socialist German

Workers Party or for having allowed themselves to be a tool in the handsof the Nazis, but were also screened for nationalist leanings, authoritarian

personality traits (particularly in the case of conductors), and thinking ofGerman Kulturas the only superior product of human mentality.8A largenumber of prominent musical figures, however, managed to glide through

the denazification process because the occupying forces, despite theirmistrust of the German cultural elite, harbored a deeply ingrained respectfor German music and placed a high priority on getting Germanys musical

life back on its feet, often at a breakneck pace.9In early 1948, the Sovietsannounced that denazification was complete in their zone and, with its

transformation into the German Democratic Republic in 1949, was free ofNazis. Under pressure to keep up, the western zones brought their denazi-fication to an abrupt end. The new Federal Republic of Germany gotswept up in the rapid reconstruction known as the economic miracle, and,

with the help of public and private support, performance venues, conser-vatories, music publishing houses, and recording companies came to rivalinternational competitors and worked to revive tourism, educational

exchange programs, export (of printed music, recordings, instruments,teaching methods), and Germanys international cultural reputation. Inthe process, many who were active and even successful in Nazi musical life

continued their careers in both German states, contributing to and bene-fiting from the huge growth of postwar music industries. From the 1950s

on, it was not difficult for stars such as Herbert von Karajan, ElisabethSchwarzkopf, and Carl Orff to deny their Nazi affiliations, because theworld wanted to believe that musicians inhabited the elevated realm of

art and would never descend into the underworld of politics.Still, the experience of denazification led both the judges and the

judged to form an exaggerated sense of what it meant to be a Nazi. Put in

the position of having to explain all behavior from 1933 to 1945, many

Germans under investigation professed their opposition to the Naziregime by transforming the smallest gestures of dissent into heroic feats of

resistance and by exaggerating the degree of terror brought upon them,explaining every act of complicity as a matter of survival. When questioned,they often denied many of their actions of the preceding twelve years,

inflated minor hardships or conflicts into evidence of their persecution, orrelied on even casual (and sometimes fabricated) associations with Jews asevidence of opposition. The stark polarity of Nazi versus non-Nazi was

softened somewhat by the consideration of such mitigating factors as anindividuals nationalism, conservatism, retreat into inner emigration,10

apolitical nature, purely artistic priorities, or veiled resistance, but these


5/29


additional classifications hardly ventured beyond the five categories of

guilt established by the Spruchkammernin 1946 and came no closer to

answering the nagging question of what it really meant to be a Nazi. Didone earn the designation of Nazi by joining the National Socialist Party?

Richard Strausss and Hans Pfitzners detractors would say no, since neitherever joined the party, but many believe they should nonetheless be vilifiedas Nazis.11Conversely, party membership alone would brand the musicologist

Kurt Huber as a Nazi, even though he was executed for his participationin the White Rose student resistance movement after drafting and distrib-uting pamphlets urging German citizens to defy the Nazi leadership.12

To add to the confusion, most biographies of prominent musicalfigures written thereafter, both scholarly and nonscholarly, glossed over

the Nazi years entirely. Reference works such as Die Musik in Geschichteund Gegenwartand even the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary ofMusic and Musiciansskipped over the Nazi-era activities of these individualsentirely.13The political involvement of the most prominent, such as Strauss

and the famed Berlin conductor Wilhelm Furtwngler, could hardly escapenotice (Furtwnglers denazification was an international cause clbreandhas even carried over into popular culture with the stage playturnedfilm

about his trial, Ronald Harwoods Taking Sides).14Most of the others,however, quietly evaded scrutiny, and anyone hoping to uncover theirsecrets met with obstacles from archivists, families, and the individuals

themselves.15Any evidence hinting at the Nazi-era successes of existingmusical institutions, industries, or individuals would not only pique the ire

of those implicated, but would also potentially jeopardize the internationalappeal of what the new Germany could offer to the music world.

This secrecy may have served the greater aims of rebuilding Germanys

musical reputation, but it made it particularly difficult to get at the bare factsabout musical activity in the Nazi years, and the subject of music and musi-cians in the Third Reich remained explicitly off-limits for an entire genera-

tion of music scholars in Germany.16Professors admonished their students

not to investigate this dark period of history, insisting that those who had notexperienced the times firsthand lacked the necessary qualifications.17A few

notable attempts to break the silence came out in the early 1980s,18but grad-ually the focus shifted to an intense investigation of the victims of NationalSocialism, broadly defined to include the good Germans (those who left

Nazi Germany) alongside persecuted Jews, Communists, and other targetedgroups. This new avenue of research launched large and well-organized initi-atives bearing such names as Exilforschung(Exile Research), Entartete Musik(Degenerate Music), and Verdrngte Musik(Suppressed Music), and pro-duced dozens of publications, exhibitions, and recordings. The purpose of

these initiatives was not only to expose the cruelties and injustices meted out


6/29


to these individuals but, in the case of composers, also to rediscover and

reanimate their silenced musical works. There was a tacit understanding that

all composers who left Nazi Germany, for any reason, were morally upstand-ing and therefore worthy of having their works taken seriously, while all

composers who remained were morally suspect and therefore artisticallyunworthy of attention, as their music most certainly represented Nazi kitschat best and racist or nationalist propaganda at worst.

Signs of the imminent breakdown of these rigid classifications wereon the horizon, however, as early as 1980. In the enigmatic case of migrcomposer Paul Hindemith, for example, Claudia Maurer Zenck brought

evidence to light about his close association with leading members ofAlfred Rosenbergs Combat League for German Culture, his promotion of

his opera Mathis der Maleras a decidedly German work, and his momen-tary rise to prominence as one of the leading composers of Nazi Germany.In the face of attacks from Nazi extremists, Hindemith used his Naziconnections, invited Hitler to attend one of his composition classes, and

even defended his work by contrasting it with the sonic orgies of migrsWeill, Krenek, and Schoenberg.19Further research on the politicalengagement of Hindemith and others continued to problematize the

traditional black-and-white categories of victim and perpetrator, leadingto the conclusion that a musicians fate depended on a certain degree oftalent, fortuitous political connections, and sheer luck.20

Such revelations, however, only intensified debates by provoking theadvocates of traditional victims to defend their subjects even more vehe-

mently, rather than encouraging musicologists to revisit and refine the cate-gories of guilt and innocence. As recently as 1999, Michael Kater andAlbrecht Riethmller organized a conference in Toronto on music in the

Third Reich in order to complete unfinished business after the Carl OrffCenter in Munich apparently refused to publish the proceedings of a confer-ence in which Kater revealed Orffs compromising behavior in the 1930s

and 1940s.21The Orff Center, one can assume, was deeply invested in the

study of the composers life and works and, given the climate that had pre-vailed since the end of the war, must have wished to preserve his image in

order to protect him andhis works from being considered morally suspectand unworthy of further study. Even at Kater and Riethmllers conferencethe debates persisted, for example, as the director of the Hindemith Insti-

tute in Frankfurt dismissed incriminating findings about Hindemith andscrutinized the reception history of Mathis der Malerin an effort to demon-strate the works inherently antifascist nature.22The author was under-

standably seeking to protect Hindemith from moral suspicion, aware thatany doubt cast on the composers victimhood might hurl him into the same

oblivion to which the majority of Nazi composers have been condemned.


7/29


The Musical Zero Hour

The almost seamless transition from the Nazi period to the postwar yearsof musical industries, operations, and individual careers was also facili-tated by the semi-official position taken by the music community, empha-sizing the differences between the recent past and the immediate future

and in effect constructing a musical zero hour. Although the term zerohour (Stunde Null) has murky origins that have been traced to the variouscalls to arms to defeat Hitler (in books by Richard Freund [1937] and

Erika Mann [1940], and a 1944 appeal by exiled leftist Karl Becker) as wellas to a 1948 Rossellini film (Germania, anno zero),23the concept gainedmost of its currency among a younger group of cultural figures who wished

to distance themselves from those who had lived through the Nazi years,prompting the publicist Hans Richter to observe in 1946 that rarely inthe history of any country . . . has such a spiritual gap between two gener-

ations opened up as now in Germany.24As the details of the Nazi yearsdescended into a confusion of repressed memories, the end of World WarII came to represent a perceptible caesura that separated the bleak past

from the promising future. Left in a state of aimlessness, this generationfound itself unable to articulate what went wrong in those twelve infamousyears, directing its energies instead to building a new future in what has

been described as a vicious circle of idealism and self-denial.25

In the music world of postwar Germany, tacit acceptance of a musi-cal zero hour allowed for portraying Nazi-era musical life as an anti-model

against which all musical activity of the postwar period could be contrasted.This was reinforced by the Allied military officers, who had reported in1945 that Hitler succeeded in transforming the lush field of musical

creativity into a barren waste, that Germanys most talented musicianshad gone abroad, and that composers in the Third Reich had producedonly works deemed psychologically effective to the Nazi cause.26An

image of a highly regimented, totalitarian society emerged in which Nazi

leaders, guided by their ideology, had taken the trouble to spell out thecriteria for unacceptable music and made sure these regulations were

enforced. Accordingly, Nazi music policy allegedly consisted of pervasivecensorship, the harnessing of all musical activity and musical creation forpolitical purposes, and above all a vehement, ideology-driven campaign to

eradicate modern music. And more often than not, Hitler himself wascited as the final arbiter of musical policy, whether or not evidence couldtrace a paper trail leading to his desk. Despite the amnesia upon which it

was based,27this Hitler-centered, musically conservative, tightly con-trolled totalitarianism served as a useful contrast to the musical diversity

and artistic freedoms to be cultivated and enjoyed in the new West


8/29


German democracy.28Musicians, composers, critics, and policymakers

could construct an identity that was free of associations with the recent

past and distance themselves from an allegedly consistent Nazi musicpolicy. By painting the bleakest picture possible of this history, one could

justify virtually any artistic direction as new and untainted, even if itcontinued a trend that may have existed during the Third Reich.

When the silence imposed by the musicology establishment was

finally broken, scholars had little to fall back on beyond these assumptionsabout the relentlessness of the totalitarian Nazi regime. The first group todefy the establishment consisted largely of the 68ers, those whose parents

were adults during the Third Reich and who became involved in thestudent movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s that aimed to imple-

ment educational reforms and put an end to the silence surrounding theThird Reich.29Attracted to the teachings of Theodor Adorno, students ofmusicology staged a rebellion against the older generation and demandedmore openness to Marxist approaches and a confrontation with the Nazi

past. In 1970 a heated debate broke out at the Bonn meeting of theGesellschaft fr Musikforschung over the political responsibility of musi-cologist Heinrich Besseler, and in 1974 students organized a Forum of

Democratic Musicology concurrent with the annual meeting of theGesellschaft, addressing several topics dealing with the Nazi years andlater pursuing investigations of the role of Bayreuth in the Third Reich,

the music of the youth movement, and exiled composers.30It was notuntil 1981, when some of these students held faculty positions of their

own, that the Gesellschaft organized a session at its annual conferencethat touched on the topic, albeit with the somewhat evasive rubric ofMusic of the 1930s, and not limited to Germany.31

The tone of the gathering still resonated with zero-hour senti-ments. Rudolf Stephan concluded his opening remarks with the follow-ing admonition:

Whoever concerns himself with the music and the musical life of theThird Reich must ask himself: did National Socialism make any contri-bution to music history? Did it achieve anything more than the namelesssuffering of countless innocents? More than the (premature) death ofmany people, including musicians? Maybe it prevented the creation ofseveral masterpieces; [but] it played no role in those masterpieces thatdid arise. (It found them repulsive.) It created nothing positive, it onlydestroyed. It only furthered the already long observed process of returninghumanity to barbarism. Nothing more and nothing less.32

By this time, however, historians had thoroughly questioned and largely

discredited the bleak, two-dimensional portrayal of Nazi society embodied


9/29


in the historical interpretation of Nazi Germany as a totalitarian state.

This totalitarian concept, which had caught on immediately after the

war through the influential writings of Hannah Arendt, rested onpresumptions that Nazi Germany adhered to a central ideology, maintained

a single mass party, functioned as a police state, and monopolized themedia and the economy.33This interpretation gained even more currencyas the Cold War intensified, with adherents using it as a basis for high-

lighting similarities between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It didnot take long, however, for historians to question the integrity of themodel, especially when New Left scholars gravitated toward Marxist

interpretations equating Nazism with fascism and linking theminextricably with capitalism.34

Similarly, the exaggeration of Hitlers role and of the existence of acoherent and consistent ideologynecessary counterparts to upholdingthe totalitarian conceptcame under fire as early as the 1960s. WestGerman historians (most notably Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen)

challenged this aspect of what came to be known as the intentionalistview by demonstrating that, rather than exerting his will in all areas ofGerman society, Hitler was one of many players in a chaotic struggle for

power. His personal obsessions notwithstanding, Hitler functioned mosteffectively as a symbol of central authority and ideological consensus,remedying both the perceived power vacuum created by the abdication of

Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 and the chaos of Weimar-era political disunity.One could even argue that Hitler deliberately kept himself at arms length

from actual policymaking in order to uphold his popular appeal and deflectany public dissatisfaction with such measures toward those governmentand party agencies issuing them, prompting such expressions of disap-

proval as if only the Fhrer knew!35At the same time, a growing numberof historians pointed to the difficulty of pinpointing a distinct Nazi ideol-ogy or program, and explained that the key to the Nazis success was their

ability to appeal to as many sectors of the German population as possible,

even when this meant making conflicting promises to win over, for exam-ple, both workers and big business simultaneously. Even basic introduc-

tory textbooks on modern German history reject the notion of a centralideology. One widely used survey concludes that the Nazis propagated,not a coherent doctrine or body of systematically interrelated ideas, but

rather a vaguer worldview made up of a number of prejudices with variedappeals to different audiences which could scarcely be dignified with theterm ideology.36

Despite these ongoing debates, even some recent studies on themusic of the Third Reich cling to these well-worn assumptions. The entry

on Germany in the latest edition of The New Grove Dictionaryasserts that


10/29


those composers who did not participate in the obligatory composition of

marches, choruses and songs and cantatas propounding Nazi ideology,

were either forced into isolation . . . or withdrew into a kind of internalexile.37In the 2003 essay collection Music and Nazism(the conferencereport for Kater and Riethmllers 1999 symposium), Reinhold Brinkmann,a pioneer in breaking the silence on the Third Reich, similarly invokes thetotalitarian concept with the presumption of composers being forced to

create monumental compositions that would embody the National Socialistagenda.38In another recent work, Frederic Spottss otherwise illuminat-ing revelations about Hitler (such as his fairly sophisticated understanding

of music and architecture and surprisingly open-minded attitude towardcurrent artistic trends) relies on the standard model of totalitarian repres-

sion in which, given Germanys incomparable wealth of musical outlets,the scope for political intervention was vast.39

Recent studies also reiterate Hitlers central role in dictating musicpolicy and taste, even while wrestling awkwardly with their own assump-

tions. Spotts, for example, claims that it was remarkably easy for Hitler toimpose his policies but on the very next page demonstrates how Hitlersrefusal to micromanage left music policies in a chaotic state. He then

concludes that Hitlers attitudes toward music were quite liberal after all,and that the dictator showed no desire to lay down aesthetic restrictionson composers.40Brinkmann combs through Mein Kampfand Hitlers earlyspeeches to demonstrate how symphonic genres could so easily be usedfor the purpose of ideology, nevertheless offering the caveat that MeinKampfis full of inconsistencies.41He has unfortunately overlooked whatmay be Hitlers most explicit public statement on the role of the symphonya speech at the 1938 Nuremberg Party Rallywhere the Fhrer not only

deems music incapable of expressing political values, but also specifiesthat the symphony was particularly unsuited for such demands.42In arecent essay collection dedicated to culture and media in the Third Reich,

the only contribution on music, by Albrecht Dmling, similarly asserts

Hitlers imposition of his musical taste on the German public, but citesevidence that is at most flimsy, if not completely irrelevant:

Hitler grounded Nazi policy on music according to his own predilections.Whatever impressed him . . . should also impress the entire Germanpopulation . . . Hitler also claimed to be an opera and concert fhrer. Hisasceticism was well known. Hitler abhorred alcohol, cigarettes, and allcorporeal pleasures: he was a vegetarian and a bachelor. This abstinenceallowed him to dedicate himself all the more exclusively to national con-cerns. There was something monklike about him, a similarity to Wagnersfigures of Lohengrin and Parsifal in the music dramas of those names.43


11/29


These recent attempts to perpetuate the image of a tightly run musi-

cal regime with Hitler at the helm come into direct conflict not only with

the historical debates cited above, but also with evidence that has beenmounting in numerous other studies of music in the Third Reich since the

early 1990s. The notion of a strict totalitarian grip on musical life began toerode in an important study of the Reich Chamber of Culture by historianAlan Steinweis, showing how music, even more than the other arts, was

far too decentralized and extensive to be brought under widespread gov-ernment or party control. Music censorship policy in Nazi Germany wasamorphous at best, and largely unenforceable given the limited personnel

and resources assigned to it. The few government-issued blacklists had alimited distribution and led to no organized measures to ensure that they

were honored.44Even in the case of jazz, which Nazi leaders such asJoseph Goebbels and Music Chamber president Peter Raabe particularlyreviled, Kater and others have shown that any attempt to limit access tothe music met with such strong public resistance that the government

retreated from its anti-jazz measures rather than risk evoking widespreaddiscontent among Germanys growing number of jazz enthusiasts.45Michael Walter challenged the totalitarianism concept further in his 1995

study on opera and pointed to the inability during the twelve years of theThird Reich to arrive at any consistent music policy.46

The application of the totalitarian concept to understanding musical

life in the Third Reich receives even more blows to its credibility in otheressays in the Music and Nazismvolume, as Celia Applegate shows thatpolitics were not as central to daily existence as one assumes, nor wasmusic all that central to political agendas.47Kim Kowalke offers severalinstances in which music publishers successfully evaded government

controls, and Stephen McClatchie provides a stunning insight into theattitudes toward censorship with the following quote by Goebbels fromNovember 1943: I have decided to lift these restrictions on German

intellectual life [Geistesleben] as soon as possible after the war. Every act of

censorship by officials threatens the free development of cultural life. Italso contradicts the idea of the Reich Culture Chamber, which is to guide

cultural production, not micromanage it.48With regard to ideology,Guido Heldt concludes that the term has been overused and misconstrued,despite its attractiveness as a concept, and that attempts to grasp it have

led only to dead ends. He states that we might fare better if we do notlook for a consistent and coherent construction of Nazi ideology, butinstead for bits and pieces, an untidy array of different ideologemes and

their translation into political workability, rooted in decades of Germanpolitics and culture before 1933, fervently believed by some and cynically

used by others, contested among factions in the Nazi apparatus, and


12/29


flexibly adapted to suit the conditions of different cultural fields.49More

and more evidence suggests that Nazi leaders valued the centrality of music

in Germanys culture so much that they were willing to grant composersand musicians a considerable degree of personal and political leeway.50

Finally, the idea that Hitler micromanaged musical policy has beenthe least stable assumption. There is little evidence, first of all, that manyGermans read Mein Kampf, and in his longest and most public excursus onmusic, the speech at the 1938 Nuremberg Party Rally, Hitler even went sofar as to declare that it would be terrible if National Socialism on the onehand were to dominate the spirit of the time and cause the dilution of our

musical creative strength, [and] on the other hand, by setting false goals,were to contribute to allowing or even leading music in the wrong direc-

tion, [a situation] which is just as bad as the general confusion we haveleft behind.51In the Music and Nazismvolume, Hans Vaget asserts thatthe legendary connections between Wagner and Hitler are elusive atbest,52and Riethmllers analysis of Strausss fall from grace shows how

inflated assumptions about Hitlers intervention in musical matters haveled to exaggerations of the relevance of Hitlers apparent snub. During hiscollaboration with the Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig, Strauss wrote an

angry letter criticizing the regime that was intercepted by the Gestapo. Hefollowed up by writing an ingratiating apology to Hitler that was neveranswered. Rather than reading too much into Hitlers silence, Riethmller

asks whether one should have even expected the Fhrer to pay attentionto the entreaties of a musical subordinate, even such a prominent figure as

Strauss, let alone the minutiae of musical aesthetics.53

Nazi Music?

We turn now to the basic assumption about Nazi music: that most, if notall, musical products of the Third Reich upheld the tenets of a centralideology and were artistically inferior. Investigations into the nature and

substance of Nazi music have taken various approaches that includeexamining style and aesthetics and, above all, defining Nazi music by whatit was not. Musicologists have looked first to opera, undoubtedly because

it held the most promise for offering irrefutable political content at least inthe texts, if not in the music. The earliest attempts included the present-ations by Carl Dahlhaus and Hans-Gnter Klein at the 1981 meeting of

the Gesellschaft fr Musikforschung, neither of which yielded conclusiveresults.54And Kleins expanded analysis, which appeared a few years later,demonstrated little progress: he could conclude only that the criteria for

acceptable opera were opaque, that the official call for Volkstmlichkeitin


13/29


opera composition was never clearly outlined, and that any attempt to

find a discrete Nazi opera theory revealed only inconsistencies.55In one of

the last of such attempts to mine opera for potential clues, a 1996 essayentitled Toward an Aesthetic of Fascist Opera, Erik Levi scrutinized

libretti as well as musical style but similarly failed to find any hard evidenceof a Nazi musical aesthetic: there were no operas with overt Nazi symbol-ism or subject matter, censorship of texts was never enforced, a revival of

Volksoperand neo-Wagnerian works was encouraged but never gainedpublic acceptance, and the presence of musical modernismranging frompercussive ostinatiand dissonance to outright atonalityreflected thergimes uncertainty with regard to musical aesthetics.56In the mean-time, the more extensive study by Walter had revealed the stark inconsis-

tencies between the pronouncements against degeneracy and the newoperatic works that thrivedand even won Hitlers praisein the ThirdReich, despite their atonal and jazz-inspired scores that were noticeablyreminiscent of works by Schoenberg, Krenek, and Weill.57

As stylistic and textual analyses of opera seemed to offer more prob-lems than solutions, those in search of Nazi music have recently soughtout new avenues, but they have not given up the search for a discrete Nazi

musical ideology or the central role of Hitler and other Nazi leaders insteering it. Under the heading Hitler and the Romantic Revival,Dmling makes inferences that lead one to think that Nazi music was

predominantly Romantic in style. Citing contemporary writings thatreiterated the Romantic notions of music as an expression of the soul

and singling out passages from Hitlers 1938 speech calling on composersto rely on their musical temperament and listen to their hearts, he refersoffhandedly to the Romanticism that acquired new prominence in the

musical life of the Nazi era.58Other recent inquiries similarly branch outbeyond the music itself into philosophy and rhetoric to single outif notNazimusic, per sea unique Nazi musical ideology or aesthetic. In a 1999collection of essays entitled Die dunkle Last, we find contributions that

contrast the philosophical tracts of Adorno and Rosenberg (without nec-essarily drawing on their writings about music), that scrutinize antiration-

alist thinking for the roots of Nazi music aesthetics (once again focusingon non-music-related writings, except for those of Pfitzner), and thattease out specific fascist syntax in the writings of the church composer

Hugo Distler.59We also find the scrutiny of such obscure musical artifactsas the harmonica for evidence of its ideological significance.60

The majority of inquiries into the nature of Nazi music, however,

draw their parameters from assumptions about what Nazi music wasnot,starting with the assumption that Nazi music was the antithesis of

modernism. Falling under the spell of a musical zero hour, music critics


14/29


and composers in the western zones of occupation and, later, the Federal

Republic subscribed to the idea that since music in the Third Reich had

become a tool of Nazi propaganda, it was necessary to promote music thatwas autonomous, devoid of any extramusical meaning, and impossible to

exploit for political purposes.61They further constructed the notion thatbecause Nazi music policy was supposedly antimodern, the task of the newGerman democracy was to resurrect modernism and to reintroduce the

works of composers whose music had allegedly been banned. With theestablishment of the Darmstdter Ferienkurse in 1946, music criticWolfgang Steinecke set out to reanimate the modernism presumably

suppressed by the Nazis and other dictatorships and chose to feature theworks of Hindemith, Bartk, Stravinsky, Krenek, Honegger, Shostakovich,

and Prokofiev, along with those of Wolfgang Fortner, Boris Blacher,Hermann Hei, and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, misleadingly implying thatthe music of all of these composers had been silenced in the Third Reich.62Adorno was also a key player in further endowing the diametrically

opposed categories of Nazi music and modern music with political signifi-cance, promoting the idea that modernists were by and large progressivein their political actions and, conversely, linking musical conservatism

with political conservatism. This led him to see Schoenberg as sociallyclairvoyant,63to label Rudolf Wagner-Rgeny as a fascist,64and topresume, incorrectly, that the twelve-tone composer Winfried Zillig must

have been driven out of Nazi Germany and gone into exile.65Theseassociations of modernism with the political left and musical conservatism

with the right held sway, reinforced in the 1960s with Peter Gays influentialbook Weimar Cultureand persisting into the 1990s in Katers first essayson the music history of the Third Reich (Kater soon corrected his stance

in his more extensive studies).66Dmlings recent essay elaborates onthem even more by referring to a generational conflict beginning in the1920s between conservative neo-Romantics who were nostalgic for the

empire, and the decidedly anti-Romantic and antinationalistic younger

generation (noting also that Nazi Kampfliederwere predominantlydiatonic in character but failing to mention the equally predominant

diatonicism of leftist song repertoire).67

A new, alternative emphasis in defining Nazi music against what itwasnotproposes that Nazi music was the antithesis of German music.Giselher Schubert, for example, uses Hindemiths opera Mathis der Malerto show how non-Germans immediately recognized its German features,thereby bestowing the work with the sense of an antifascist confession.68

This rather circuitous argument is weakened by the fact that the foreignobservers he quotesfrom Switzerland, Holland, and Englandcould

hardly have thought of themselves as antifascist in 1938, the year that


15/29


Mathis der Malerpremiered in Zurich. Nevertheless, Schubert defends

Mathisagainst the charge that Hindemith composed a purely German

oeuvre to win favor with Nazi leaders. By arguing that the operas subject,German Renaissance painter Matthias Grnewald, had been favored by

Weimar-era artists and literati but shunned by Rosenberg as an exampleof Semitic infiltration, Schubert misleads us into thinking thatGrnewalds art was reviled or ignored during the Third Reich.69

Once again, evidence that has accumulated over the years continuesto challenge these negative parameters for Nazi music. To begin with,many of the composers presumably brought out of silence in Darmstadt in

1946 had never been banned in the Third Reich. Stravinsky was far fromabsent in Germany in the 1930s,70and in fact the Nazi campaigns against

musical modernism seem to have abated after the first few years of theregime. Even though the Degenerate Music exhibit of 1938 attackedSchoenberg, Webern, Krenek, and Weill and singled out Schoenbergsatonal music as a plot to undo the victorious German invention of the

triad, there were no concerted efforts to eliminate atonal or twelve-tonecomposition in Nazi Germany. In a 1934 tribute marking Schoenbergssixtieth birthday, Herbert Gerigk, the music critic and employee of Nazi

ideologue Rosenberg, even claimed that in the right hands (i.e., in thehands of a composer of pure blood and pure character), atonality could bean effective means of expression.71Thus Paul von Klenau, a Danish stu-

dent of Schoenbergs, managed to have his twelve-tone operas premieredon major German stages in 1933, 1937, 1939, and 1940, and Zillig, who

also dabbled in such experiments, received commissions from the NS-Kulturgemeinde and held a position in a local office of the Reich MusicChamber.72Finally, Adornos assessments of modernist and conservative

composers and their politics were complicated by revelations of Schoenbergsown nationalist sentiments and self-identification with the bourgeoistraditions of the past,73by the touting of Wagner-Rgeny in Communist

East Germany as a composer for the masses and thus antifascist,74and by

the fact that Zillig, who did not emigrate, achieved a significant degree ofsuccess in the Third Reich.

This is not to say that atonal and twelve-tone composition finallyenjoyed widespread appeal in the Third Reich, but rather to show thatmodernism in a broader sense was not as reviled as many have assumed.

At the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Baden-Badenfrom 1933 until the outbreak of the war, many modern composers, eventhose who had flourished in the Weimar Republic, shared the spotlight

with younger, less conservative German composers as well as non-Germans, as the xenophobia of the early years of the Third Reich had

subsided significantly. Contrary to popular belief, the music heard at


16/29


Baden-Baden was not predominantly of a late Romantic style, but rather

tended toward the neoclassicism of the 1920s, with strong echoes of

Hindemith and Stravinsky. Hindemith, meanwhile, continued to hope forhis rehabilitation in Germany, and his music played to rave reviews at

Baden-Baden and was widely praised in the German press. Bartk wasequally well received in Baden-Baden, even after his well-publicized state-ments against the Nazi government. With regard to the fate of twelve-

tone composition, Zillig and others had shifted their style away fromSchoenbergs teachings in the works performed at Baden-Baden; still,according to Joan Evans, one should not assume, however, that the changes

heard in post-1933 music of German composers at Baden-Baden andelsewhere were due entirely to the necessity of adjusting to new cultural-

political realities. In music, as in other arts, the economic and politicalupheavals of the 1930s triggered a widespread stylistic simplification. Shegoes on to say that despite the ideological differences that separatedNazi Germany from her neighbors, the tonally oriented, nationally tinged

styles adopted by a broad range of composers in the 1930s made feasibleGermanys attempt, after the isolation of the early Nazi years, to reenterthe wider world of modern music.75

Future Tasks

The most obvious task for writing a revised history of music in the ThirdReich is to look objectively at the music created in the period. Perhapsthere is an underlying unease about finding similarities among the works

of composers we have come to regard as good and bad or, what is evenharder to rationalize with the image of a totalitarian dictatorship, aboutdiscovering a greater degree of openness and freedom in compositional

style and musical consumption than we have thus far imagined. Yet theaversion to studying the music that, one assumes, must be tainted becauseit was produced in Nazi Germany has conceivably created confusion about

the meaning of musical nationalism and modernism, as ripe opportunitiesto trace continuities and developments of musical trends both within andbeyond Germany may have been missed. The works of Werner Egk, Zillig,

Orff, and Wagner-Rgeny need to be studied not for what makes theirmusic distinctly Nazibecause, as we know, many of their works from thisperiod actually thrived in the postwar repertoire76but for the features

they might potentially share with other music we have come to regard asworthy of inclusion in the canon. Similarities with the music of Stravinskyand Schoenberg have already been observed in the works of Orff, Egk,

Zillig, and Klenau, and it may also be possible to rediscover the compositional


17/29


legacies of Strauss, Hindemith, Reger, Busoni, Weill, and Krenek in the

works of followers and contemporaries who thrived in Nazi Germany.77

This music must also be viewed in comparison with contemporarytrends in other countries, and not only the dictatorships of fascist Italy

and Stalinist Russia. When the Gesellschaft fr Musikforschung firstopenly confronted the topic of music in the Third Reich at its 1981meeting in Bayreuth, its decision to juxtapose German music with that of

other countries under the rubric of Music in the 1930s seemed to evade adirect confrontation with the Nazi past. In retrospect, however, this juxta-position with the contemporary trends worldwide may have opened the

door to discovering important commonalities. Most of the contributionstended to romanticize the 1920s and view the 1930s as an artistic low

point, but they did not restrict these negative characterizations to NaziGermany or other repressive regimes. Dahlhaus speaks of a compositionalregression and a turn toward populism not only in the Third Reichand Stalinist Russia but also under democracies, while Jzsef Ujfalussy, in

a discussion of Eastern Europe, observes the widespread attraction to folkculture (taking care, however, to distinguish the Eastern European varietiesfrom parallel trends serving German nationalism).78Marius Flothuis, in

discussing the music of England, France, and Holland, pinpoints the WallStreet crash as the dawn of the 1930s and characterizes the musicalclimate of the decade as one of exhaustion, or at least a point of no return

in relation to the experiments of the 1920s, in some cases because many ofthose experiments had been tamed and normalized by 1930.79In the

closing summary, Albrecht Riethmller highlights other common trends,such as turns toward neoclassicism, popular accessibility, ethical or reli-gious subjects (juxtaposing Kreneks Karl Vand Hindemiths Mathis derMalerwith Schoenbergs Moses und Aron), and the monumentality of thesymphony, not only in Germany but also in the United States.80Withregard to racism and notions of degeneracy, Dmling has shown more

recently that the international (specifically American and British) reac-

tions to the notorious Degenerate Music exhibit were neutral, if notsympathetic.81Many nations, whether dictatorships or democracies, were

dealing with the Depression, world wars, rising nationalist sentiment,racism, xenophobia, technological progress, and class and ethnic conflict.Further comparative studies may reveal that many of the musical trends

we have come to regard specifically as Nazi, or somewhat more broadly asfascist (in the growing number of studies that compare music and cultureunder Hitler and Mussolini82), may be far more universal and characteris-

tic of the times.Another task is to consider anew the function of music in Nazi

Germany. One of the few times the term Nazi music has been explicitly


18/29


invoked was in Riethmllers final presentation at the 1999 conference,

entitled Nazi Music: Concluding Remarks (not included in the published

proceedings). It centered around two film clips: one showing Furtwnglerconducting Beethovens Ninth Symphony for Hitler and his entourage in

a swastika-decked concert hall, the other showing Hitler arriving atBayreuth in his motorcade and being warmly greeted by WinifredWagner, underscored with the Meistersingeroverture. This presentation,which (probably intentionally) fell far short of defining the term Nazimusic, prompted more questions than answers. Is Nazi music simply themusic used in conjunction with political ceremonies? Is it any symphony

or opera performed in the presence of Hitler, Goering, or Goebbels? IfNazi music describes music used for Nazi functions, then how is this

employment different from any other use of music for political purposes,in Germany and elsewhere? How does this differ, for example, from thepolitical exploitation of Beethoven from the founding of the Second Reichin 1871 to the celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989?83

Nevertheless, Riethmllers presentation did draw attention to thepotentially powerful function of music in German society during the 1930sand 1940s. The evidence of serious gaps between theory and practice in

the musical life of the Third Reich has shown how crucial it is to study thefunction of music not only in its propaganda and ceremonial uses (noreven merely in the new works commissioned for political functions), but

also in what was performed and consumed in a broader context. Despitethe highly publicized promotion of Wagner, music historians have

observed that the Hitler Youth shunned Wagner in favor of communalmusic making, young composers of the 1920s and 1930s saw no purpose incontinuing along Wagners path, and Wagner productions declined over-

all in the 1930s and 1940s.84And despite the vilification of atonality andjazz in the Degenerate Music exhibit (an event so shrill in its tone thatRaabe resigned as Music Chamber president in protest, and Goebbels,

who shunned the event, shut it down prematurely85), atonal and even

twelve-tone composition lived on, and American jazz enjoyed a greaterpopularity during the Third Reich than during the Weimar Republic.

Random samples of repertoire lists of orchestras and opera houses, of radioplaylists, of record production, and of programs of amateur organizationshave revealed further surprises: the continued performance of Jewish or

degenerate composers such as Mendelssohn, Zemlinsky, and Berg, and ahealthy representation of foreign music.86A more focused investigation ofperformances of new compositions, furthermore, will also tell us much

about the public response to such novelties if their premieres are exam-ined for the prestige of their venues, their critical reception, and above all

the longevity of the works beyond the first hearing. As we know from


19/29


studies on public opinion in the Third Reich, the Sicherheitsdienst(Security Service) worked with other organizations to carefully monitor

reactions to current events, civil and military actions, and propagandacampaigns. The opinions of the music-loving public, whether in the

form of Sicherheitsdienstreports, box office receipts, diaries, radio play-lists, or other less obvious forms of documentation, may reveal furthersurprises.

It seems inevitable that debates about the political culpability ofindividuals will persist, especially if the stakes remain so high for composers,for whom an up or down vote can determine inclusion in the canon. If

such is the case, then it is important to consider all the scholarship onmusical life in the Third Reich that, taken together, reveals the complexity

of the day-to-day existence of musicians and composers. Many are knownto have embraced the new regime for the promises it presented for regain-ing self-worth, professional integrity, and economic security. At the sametime, the music community had witnessed in the first few years of the

regime how Schoenberg was compelled to resign his post at the PrussianAcademy of Arts, Bruno Walter was threatened and coerced into cancelinghis German engagements, Hindemith was caught in the crossfire of the

Goebbels-Rosenberg rivalry and fled the country, and even the Aryancomposer and president of the Reich Music Chamber, Richard Strauss,temporarily became a pariah for refusing to break off his collaboration

with Zweig. Musicians soon had to prove their Aryan lineage in order togain working papers, and no one was completely protected from the arbi-

trariness of political cronyism. It may therefore be advisable to adoptthe middle-ground interpretation around which historians seem to beconverging: having witnessed early acts of terror and intimidation in the

revolutionary period of the Third Reich, the majority of Germans ledtheir lives as before and took advantage of opportunities that came alongbut considered the path of least resistance as the best way to proceed.

Although many in the music world may have rejoiced in Germanys

reclaimed dignity, enjoyed artistic freedoms as before, and reaped the ben-efits of new economic safeguards, they also may have carefully considered

the potential risks of challenging authority, having observed the radicaltone of propaganda and the fate of unfortunate colleagues whose careersand reputations were severely compromised as a result of arbitrary political

witch-hunts. Historian Robert Gellately, for one, has recently painted apicture of a Third Reich dominated more by willing conformity thanrepressive coercion, a particularly useful model for understanding musical

life. He concludes that Germans welcomed the antidotes the Nazis offeredfor the chaos of the Weimar Republic in their promises to decrease unem-

ployment and in their projection of governmental stability and strength.


20/29


Any lingering doubts about the Nazi system were soon supplanted by

fierce nationalism once the war began, and radical measures, including

those that led to genocide, could proceed under the guise of a state ofemergency. Much care was taken throughout the years of the Third Reich

to mold propaganda to appeal to German citizens, and the relentlesspromotion of the idea of a peoples community (Volksgemeinschaft)actually encouraged many to denounce their friends and relatives and

made resistance that much more difficult.87

Finally, a key to understanding Nazi music as a historiographic phe-nomenon may lie in a careful scrutiny of the experiences, perceptions, and

motives of musical figures driven out of Nazi Germany. The very theoriesof totalitarianism sprung from the influential writings of a German living

in exile, Hannah Arendt, and many of the notions about the culture ofthe Nazis that continue to dominate the discourse were first proposed byher exiled compatriots: Adornos declaration that no poetry could be writ-ten after Auschwitz, and Walter Benjamins influential formulation of

fascism fostering an aestheticization of politics. Recent studies in the cul-tural realms have further shown how exiled artists were the most vocal inproclaiming and redressing Nazi oppression, especially as the war began and,

as aliens, they needed to demonstrate their commitment to democracyand distance themselves as much as possible from Nazi cultural life. Afterthe Degenerate Art exhibit in 1937, artists living in exile even managed to

revive interest in modernism by promoting it as a relic of democracy andindividualism, long after it had been neglected in Britain and the United

States.88With regard to music, Wagner scholars have shown that many ofthe ongoing debates about Wagners influence over Hitler, the Germans,and the extermination policies of the Nazi government can be traced to

suggestions first offered by Germans in exile, which then gained momen-tum after the war. Adornos In Search of Wagnerof 193738 proposed thatthe Ringhad provided the Germans with a much needed mythology andthat Wagners anti-Semitism could be detected not only in his prose but

also in the music dramas;89

Thomas Manns 1938 essay Brother Hitlerplaced the dictator within an artistic lineage going back to Wagner;90and

Emil Ludwig in 1941 cited Wagner as one of the most dangerous figures inGerman history.91Mann later problematized the entire history of Germansrelationship with music in his novel Dr. Faustusby suggesting how thisalliance had turned unholy and led Germany to its downfall,92andAdornos advocacy on behalf of Schoenberg (and simultaneous rejectionof Stravinsky and Strauss) contributed to setting the course for the zero-

hour musical ideology. By acquiescing to both Adorno and Mann in striv-ing to create music that was value-free, devoid of extramusical meaning,

neutral, rational, and scientifically grounded, postwar composers were


21/29


trying to establish a healthier post-Holocaust relationship between

Germans and their music.

What, in the end, will be the fate of Nazi music? Ernst Blochs oft-cited observation that the music of the Nazis is not the prelude to Meis-tersinger, but rather the Horst Wessel Song [the unofficial Nazi nationalanthem]93may be useful if we restrict the definition of Nazi music to thenarrow parameters of the song literature of the Nazi party and its affiliate

groups. Even then, one should not expect to unlock any clues about themusical peculiarities of a Nazi aesthetic by examining the repertoire, asthe songs, unique only in their graphic texts, relied on borrowed melodies

or militaristic styles virtually indistinguishable from the song literature ofthe left wing. Yet perhaps it is too early to abandon the concept of Nazi

music entirely, for it is a pervasive shorthand that may remain a part ofour consciousness until we gain a more nuanced understanding of theperiod and its musical life. Eventually, however, even the term Nazi maycome to represent little more than a caricature, a catchall that embodies

an outdated historical narrative in which a force of evil arose out ofnowhere, overtook Germany from 1933 to 1945, and ceased to exist oncethe Allies restored order and goodness. Nazi may become a term that

functioned for a period of time as an anti-model, a symbol from whichpostwar generations derived comfort in their perceived distance and dif-ference from it, but which lost its usefulness once a more multifaceted

understanding of the era was gained.

Notes

Pamela M. Potter is Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Shehas written extensively on music and politics in twentieth-century Germany and is bestknown for her work on the history of German musicology (Most German of the Arts: Musi-cology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of HitlersReich, 1998; German ed.:2000) and on the connections between music and identity (Music and German NationalIdentity, co-edited with Celia Applegate, 2002). Her current projects include a history of

musical life in twentieth-century Berlin and a book on Nazi aesthetics in the visual andperforming arts. E-mail address: [email protected].

Earlier versions of this article were delivered as lectures for the music departments atDuke University, University of Chicago, University of California at Berkeley, StanfordUniversity, University of Notre Dame, and Tufts University, and at the Center forGerman and European Studies at the University of Wisconsin. I would like to expressmy deepest gratitude to the many colleagues who took the time to read the manuscriptat various stages and offered their valuable criticisms and suggestions: Celia Applegate,Joseph Auner, Philip Bohlman, Joy Calico, Charles Dill, Joan Evans, Jane Fulcher,Bryan Gilliam, Thomas Grey, and Richard Taruskin.

1. Joan L. Clinefelter,Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi

Germany(Oxford: Berg, 2005), 100.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


22/29


2. Bernd Sponheuer, The National Socialist Discussion on the German Quality inMusic, in Music and Nazism: Art Under Tyranny, 19331945, ed. Michael H. Kater andAlbrecht Riethmller (Laaber: Laaber, 2003), 37.

3. See Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in ModernEurope and America(New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Eric Salzman, Twentieth-CenturyMusic: An Introduction, 4th ed., Prentice Hall History of Music (Upper Saddle River,NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002); Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century(New York: Schirmer, 1988); and Bryan Simms, Music of the Twentieth Century: Style andStructure, 2nd ed. (New York: Schirmer, 1996).

4. Such composers include Paul Graener, Werner Egk, Wolfgang Fortner, WinfriedZillig, Paul von Klenau, Hermann Reutter, Ernst Pepping, Kurt Thomas, JohannNepomuk David, and Hugo Distler. Like Carl Orff in West Germany, Ottmar Gerster andRudolf Wagner-Rgeny managed to downplay their Nazi-era successes and rose to promi-

nence in East Germany after the war.5. Quote from report of the U.S. Information Control Division (Dec. 1945), DavidMonod, Verklrte Nacht: Denazifying Musicians under Nazi Control, in Music andNazism, 297.

6. David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans,19451953(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 56, 47, 13943.

7. Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Das Ende des Reiches und die Neubildung deutscher Staaten, 9thed., Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte 22 (Munich: DAV, 1980), 11222.

8. Quote from the Manual for the Control of German Information Services [1945],Monod, Verklrte Nacht, 298.

9. Monod, Settling Scores, 12866.

10. On the origins of this term and the ensuing controversies, see Reinhold Grimm,Innere Emigration als Lebensform, in Exil und innere Emigration: Third WisconsinWorkshop, Wissenschaftliche Paperbacks Literaturwissenschaft 17, ed. Jost Hermand andReinhold Grimm (Frankfurt/Main: Athenum Verlag, 1972), 3173.

11. For discussions of Pfitzner and Strauss, see Michael H. Kater, Composers of the NaziEra: Eight Portraits(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jens Malte Fischer, TheVery German Fate of a Composer: Hans Pfitzner, in Music and Nazism, 7589; MichaelH. Kater, Culture, Society, and Politics in the Cosmos of Hans Pfitzner the German,in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela M. Potter

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 17889; Albrecht Riethmller, StefanZweig and the Fall of the Reich Music Chamber President, Richard Strauss, in Music andNazism, 26991; and Pamela M. Potter, Strauss and the National Socialists: The Debateand Its Relevance, in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed.Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 93113.

12. On Huber, see Peter Petersen, Wissenschaft und Widerstand: ber Kurt Huber(18931943), in Die dunkle Last: Musik und Nationalsozialismus, Schriften zur Musikwis-senschaft und Musiktheorie 3, ed. Brunhilde Sonntag, Hans-Werner Boresch, and DetlefGojowy (Cologne: Bela Verlag, 1999), 11129; and Pamela M. Potter, Most German of theArts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitlers Reich(NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 12024.


23/29


13. See Roman Brotbeck, Verdrngung und Abwehr. Die verpate Vergangenheitsbe-wltigung in Friedrich Blumes Enzyklopdie Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart,in Musikwissenschafteine versptete Disziplin? Die akademische Musikforschung zwischenFortschrittsglauben und Modernittsverweigerung, ed. Anselm Gerhard (Stuttgart: Metzler,2000), 27379. Stanley Sadie made a concerted effort to correct this lacuna in the secondedition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, enlisting Erik Levi and othersto correct the entries on composers active in the Third Reich.

14. Other popular examinations include Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devils Music Master:The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwngler(New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992); Bernd W. Wessling, Furtwngler: Eine kritische Biographie(Stuttgart: DeutscheVerlags-Anstalt, 1985); and Fred K. Prieberg, Kraftprobe: Wilhelm Furtwngler im DrittenReich(Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus, 1986), translated into English by Christopher Dolanas Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwngler in the Third Reich(Boston, MA: NortheasternUniversity Press, 1994).

15. As late as the 1990s, Michael Kater met with resistance when trying to interviewElisabeth Schwarzkopf. See Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in theThird Reich(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 61.

16. Historian Joseph Wulfs incendiary publication of documents on music in theThird Reich (Musik im Dritten Reich,Kunst und Kultur im Dritten Reich 2 [Gtersloh:Sigbert Mohn, 1963]) prompted the musicology establishment to brand him as a liar. SeeHans-Gnter Klein, Vorwort. Verdrngung und Aufarbeitung, in Musik und Musikpolitikin faschistischen Deutschland, ed. Hanns-Werner Heister and Hans-Gnter Klein (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1984), 9. Thereafter, two American dissertations in history appeared in1970 but remained largely unnoticed for many years: Michael Meyer, Assumptions and

Implementation of Nazi Policy toward Music (PhD diss., University of CaliforniaLosAngeles, 1970), and Donald Wesley Ellis, Music in the Third Reich: National SocialistAesthetic Theory as Governmental Policy (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1970).

17. Klein, Vorwort, 9.

18. Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat(Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1982), and Heisterand Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik.

19. Claudia Maurer Zenck, Zwischen Boykott und Anpassung an den Charackter derZeit: ber die Schwierigkeiten eines deutschen Komponisten mit dem Dritten Reich,Hindemith-Jahrbuch9 (1980): 65129.

20. Kater, Twisted Muse, 6; Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era; and Michael Meyer,The Politics of Music in the Third Reich, American University Studies Series 9, vol. 49(New York: Peter Lang, 1991).

21. Kater, Introduction, Music and Nazism, 12.

22. Giselher Schubert, The Aesthetic Premises of a Nazi Conception of Music, inMusic and Nazism, 7071.

23. Stephen Brockmann, German Culture at the Zero Hour, in Revisiting Zero Hour1945: The Emergence of Postwar German Culture, ed. Frank Trommler and StephenBrockmann, Humanities Program Report 1 (Washington, DC: American Institute forContemporary German Studies, 1996), 1213.

24. Hans Richter, quoted in Brockmann, German Culture, 17.


24/29


25. Renate Finkh, quoted in Brockmann, German Culture, 21.

26. Quoted in Monod, Settling Scores,116.

27. See Monod, Settling Scores, 261; and Amy Beal, Negotiating Cultural Allies:American Music in Darmstadt, 19461958,Journal of the American Musicological Society53 (2000): 1078.

28. The postwar perception of a Nazi music aesthetic came to have opposite meaningsin East and West Germany: initially both sides agreed that it was necessary to learn aboutall the music supposedly not heard in Nazi Germany in order to encourage new musicaltrends in postwar Germanythis included music of the avant-garde, as well as any musicfrom former enemy countries. By 1950, however, the Soviets enforced their own aestheticpolicies in East Germany that judged music of the avant-garde as formalist and thereforeunacceptable. Meanwhile, West Germany responded to this proclamation by encouragingall that the Soviets rejected. Thus the music consultants in the U.S. military workedclosely with the organizers of the Summer Courses for International New Music inDarmstadt to formulate a Cold War musical response to Communist music policy andencouraged all that the Soviets dismissed. Both sides, however, implicitly believed thatthey were differentiating postwar German musical life from that of the Third Reich.

29. See for example Sabine von Dirke, Where Were You 19331945?: The Legacy ofthe Nazi Past Beyond the Zero Hour, in Revisiting Zero Hour 1945, 7188.

30. Klein, Vorwort, 910.

31. Die Musik der 1930er Jahre, in Bericht ber den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichenKongress Bayreuth 1981, Gesellschaft fr Musikforschung, ed. Christoph-Hellmut Mahlingand Sigrid Wiesmann (Kassel: Brenreiter, 1984), 14282, 471503; an expanded version

of Albrecht Riethmllers paper appeared as Komposition im Deutschen Reich um 1936,inArchiv fr Musikwissenschaft38, no. 4 (1983): 24178.

32. Wer sich mit der Musik und mit dem Musikleben im Dritten Reich beschftigt,mu sich die Frage stellen: hat der Nationalsozialismus in der Musikgeschichte gewirkt?Hat er mehr bewirkt, als namenloses Elend fr zahllose Unschuldige? Mehr als den(vorzeitigen) Tod vieler Menschen und mithin auch Musiker? Vielleicht hat er ver-hindert, da einige Meisterwerke entstanden sind; an denen, die entstanden sind, hat erkeinen Anteil. (Sie waren ihm zuwider.) Positiv hat er gar nichts bewirkt, nur zerstrt. Erhat den schon lnger beobachteten Proze der Rebarbarisierung der Menschen gefrdert.Nicht mehr und nicht weniger. Rudolf Stephan, Zur Musik der Dreiigerjahre, inBericht ber den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981, 147.

33. Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd ed.(London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 2122.

34. Kershaw,Nazi Dictatorship, chap. 13; and Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The NaziPast in the Two Germanys(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

35. Mary Fulbrook, The Divided Nation: A History of Germany 19181990(Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1991), 69; see also Kershaw,Nazi Dictatorship, chap. 4; andRobert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany(Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001), 257.

36. Fulbrook, Divided Nation, 51. More recently, Peter Fritzsche argued that unlike the less

successful single-issue parties, the Nazi party succeeded by promoting an idea of community


25/29


that would unite all (non-Jewish) Germans, obliterate their deep-seated rivalries, andpromise a bright future. This vision enabled the Nazi party to appeal to the vast majoritywho were disillusioned with alternatives across the political spectrum and to attract vot-ers from all economic classes. He states: The National Socialists embodied a broad butextremely vague desire for national renewal and social reform that neither Wilhelminenor Weimar Germany had been able to satisfy. . . . [They] twisted together strands fromthe political Left and the political Right without being loyal to the precepts of eithercamp. Peter Fritzsche, Germans Into Nazis(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1998), especially 197214 (quote from 21214).

37. Giselher Schubert, Germany, I:5, Grove Music Online,http://www.grovemusic.com(accessed 27 Jan. 2006) ed. L. Macy.

38. Reinhold Brinkmann, The Distorted Sublime: Music and National SocialistIdeologyA Sketch, in Music and Nazism, 50.

39. Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics(London: Hutchinson, 2002),27273.

40. Spotts, Hitler, 27276

41. Brinkmann, The Distorted Sublime, 45.

42. Michael Walter, Hitler in der Oper: Deutsches Musikleben 19191945(Stuttgart:Metzler, 1995), 19598.

43. Albrecht Dmling, The Target of Racial Purity: The Degenerate Music Exhibitionin Dsseldorf, 1938, inArt, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich, ed. Richard Etlin(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 54.

44. Alan E. Steinweis,Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambersof Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1993), 13842.

45. See Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Hans Dieter Schfer, Das gespaltene Bewutsein:Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 19331945, 2nd ed. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1982),13338; and Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Hitlers Dancers: German Modern Dance andthe Third Reich, trans. Jonathan Steinberg (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 16789.

46. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 21362.

47. Celia Applegate, The Past and Present of Hausmusikin the Third Reich, in Music

and Nazism, 14547.48. Kim H. Kowalke, Music and Publishing and the Nazis: Schott, Universal Edition,and Their Composers, in Music and Nazism, 170218; Stephen McClatchie, WagnerResearch as Service to the People: The Richard-Wagner Forschungssttte, 19381945, inMusic and Nazism, 160.

49. Guido Heldt, Hardly Heroes: Composers as a Subject in National SocialistCinema, in Music and Nazism,116.

50. Kater, Twisted Muse, 17879.

51. Es wrde nun aber schlimm sein, wenn der Nationalsozialismus auf der einen Seiteden Geist einer Zeit besiegt, der zur Ursache fr das Verblassen unserer musikalischenSchpferkraft wurde, auf der anderen aber durch eine falsche Zielsetzung selbst mithilft,
http://www.grovemusic.com/http://www.grovemusic.com/


26/29


die Musik auf einem Irrweg zu belassen oder gar zu fhren, der genauso schlimm ist wie diehinter uns liegende allgemeine Verwirrung. Quoted in Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 196.

52. Hans Rudolf Vaget, Hitlers Wagner: Musical Discourse as Cultural Space, inMusic and Nazism, 1531.

53. Riethmller, Stefan Zweig, in Music and Nazism, 270.

54. See Carl Dahlhaus, Politische Implikationen der Operndramaturgie. Zu einigendeutschen Opern der Dreiiger Jahre, and Hans-Gnter Klein, Atonalitt in den Opernvon Paul von Klenau und Winfried Zillig-zur Duldung einer im Nationalsozialismus ver-femten Kompositionstechnik, in Bericht ber den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichenKongress Bayreuth 1981, 14853 and 49094.

55. Klein, Viel Konformitt und wenig Verweigerung: Zur Komposition neuer Opern19331944, in Musik und Musikpolitik, 14548.

56. Erik Levi, Toward an Aesthetic of Fascist Opera, in Fascism and Theatre:Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 19251945, ed.Gnter Berghaus (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996), 264.

57. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 175213.

58. Dmling, Target of Racial Purity, 5354.

59. Lucia Sziborsky, Adornos Musikphilosophie und die Nazi-sthetik, 2341;Hans-Werner Boresch, Zersetzender Intellektualismus und apodiktischer Glaube: DieNationalsozialisten in der Tradition des Antirationalismus, 6491; and Bettina Schlter,Paradoxie und Ritualisierung-Die Kirchenmusikalische Erneuerungsbewegung und derNationalsozialismus, 13045, all three essays in Die dunkle Last.

60. Thomas Eickhoff, HarmonikaHeil: ber ein Musikinstrument und seineIdeologisierung im Nationalsozialismus, in Die dunkle Last, 14683.

61. Gesa Kordes, Darmstadt, Postwar Experimentation, and the West German Searchfor a New Musical Identity, in Music and German National Identity, 20517.

62. Danielle Fosler-Lussier has done extensive research in this area for her study onBartks legacy and the Cold War; I am grateful to her for sharing with me her work inprogress.

63. Whrend es sich herausstellen wird, da die diffamierte, isolierte ProduktionSchnbergs nach dem Ma ihrer eigenen sachlich musikalischen Konsistenz viel wahrerdie gesellschaftlichen Anliegen vertritt, die von der Gemeinschaftsmusik durch Anpassungan die Linie des geringsten Widerstands verflscht werden. Theodor W. Adorno, DieGeschichte der deutschen Musik von 1908 bis 1933, in Musikalische Schriften VI,Gesammelte Schriften ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Klaus Schultz, vol. 19 (Frankfurt/Main:Suhrkamp, 1984), 622.

64. Adorno, Geschichte der deutschen Musik, 628.

65. Fred K. Prieberg, Nach dem Endsieg oder Musiker-Mimikry, in Musik und Musik-politik, 300.

66. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider(New York: Harper & Row,1968), and Michael H. Kater, The Revenge of the Fathers: The Demise of ModernMusic at the End of the Weimar Republic, German Studies Review15, no. 2 (1992):295315.


27/29


67. Dmling, Target of Racial Purity, 44, 50.

68. Schubert, Nazi Conception of Music, in Music and Nazism, 70.

69. Much to the contrary, a search of Nazi-era literature reveals at least twenty titlesdedicated to Grnewald scholarship and lore.

70. Joan Evans, Stravinskys Music in Hitlers Germany,Journal of the AmericanMusicological Society56, no. 3 (2003): 52594.

71. Herbert Gerigk, Eine Lanze fr Schnberg, Die Musik27 (1934): 89.

72. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, 30306.

73. Werner Schmidt-Faber, Atonalitt im Dritten Reich, in HerausforderungSchnberg: Was die Musik des Jahrhunderts vernderte, ed. Ulrich Dibelius (Munich:Carl Hanser Verlag, 1974), 12224.

74. See for example Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler der Deutschen DemokratischenRepublik(Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, 1959), 191.

75. Joan Evans, International with National Emphasis: The Internationales Zeitgens-sisches Musikfestin Baden-Baden, 19361939, in Music and Nazism, 108.

76. Egks Circe, written during the war, was touted in 1948 as modishly modern, andMathis der Malerwas similarly publicized in 1946 as utterly new (Monod, Settling Scores,260), while Wagner-Rgenys operas Die Brger von Calais,Johanna Balk, and DerGnstling(all composed between 1935 and 1940) went on to succeed in East Germanopera houses. See Gerd Riencker, Klassizismus oderals Moderne?-Rings um die OperDie Brger von Calaisvon Rudolf Wagner-Rgeny, in Die dunkle Last, 391404.

77. Evans, International with National Emphasis, 108, and Riencker, Klassizismusoderals Moderne? 397. See also the Nazi-era observations that Egks opera Peer Gynt,premiering in 1938, closely resembled the music of Weill and Krenek (Walter, Hitler inder Oper, 17880).

78. Carl Dahlhaus, Politische Implikationen, 14849, and Jzsef Ujfalussy, Musik-politische Lehren der Dreiiger Jahre in Ost-Europa, 16869, in Bericht ber den inter-nationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981.

79. Marius Flothuis, Elan und Ermdung: Musik um 1930 in England, Frankreich undden Niederlanden, in Bericht ber den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen KongressBayreuth 1981, 15455, 157.

80. Albrecht Riethmller, Die Dreiiger Jahre: Eine Dekade kompositorischerErmdung oder Konsolidierung? Zusammenfassung der Diskussion, in Bericht ber deninternationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981, 17677, 179.


82. See for example Fascism and Theatre; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascists and NationalSocialists: The Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship, inArt, Culture, and Media, 25784;Andrea Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf: Die Beziehungen zwischenDrittem Reich und faschistischem Italien in den Bereichen Medien, Kunst, Wissenschaft und

Rassenfragen(Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1998); and Jrg Stenzl, Fascismokein Thema?in MusikforschungFaschismusNationalsozialismus: Referate der Tagung Schloss Engers(8. bis 11. Mrz 2000), ed. Isolde v. Foerster, Christoph Hust, and Christoph-HellmutMahling (Mainz: Are-Edition, 2001), 14350.


28/29


83. David Denniss study of Beethovens Ninth Symphony offers a telling example ofthe political appeal of the symphony for a period of over 150 years of German history.Beethoven in German Politics, 18701989(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

84. Reinhold Brinkmann, Wagners Aktualitt fr den Nationalsozialismus: Fragmenteeiner Bestandsaufnahme, in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich: Ein Schloss Elmau-Symposion,ed. Saul Friedlnder and Jrn Rsen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2000), 11214, 12122; HenryBair, Die Lenkung der Berliner Opernhuser, in Musik und Musikpolitik, 88; HubertKolland, Wagner und der deutsche Faschismus, in Musik und Musikpolitik, 12635; andKolland, Wagner-Rezeption im deutschen Faschismus, in Bericht ber den internationalenmusikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981, 494503.


86. On radio, see Rita von der Grn, Funktionen und Formen von Musiksendungen inRundfunk, in Musik und Musikpolitik, 98106; on record production, see Martin Elste,Zwischen Privatheit und Politik: Die Schallplattenindustrie im NS-Staat, in Musik undMusikpolitik, 10714. On the performance of Mendelssohn, see for example AntoinetteHellkuhl, Hier sind wir versammelt zu lblichem Tun: Der Deutsche Sngerbund infaschistischer Zeit, in Musik und Musikpolitik, 199; and Pamela M. Potter, The NaziSeizure of the Berlin Philharmonic, or the Decline of a Bourgeois Musical Institution,inNational Socialist Cultural Policy, ed. Glenn R. Cuomo (New York: St. Martins Press,1995), 5354.

87. Gellately, Backing Hitler, 25763.

88. Keith Holz, The Exiled Artists from Nazi Germany and their Art, inArt, Culture,and Media, 34367.

89. Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London andNew York: Verso, 1984), 11429.

90. Hans Rudolf Vaget, Du warst mein Feind von je: The Beckmesser ControversyRevisited, in WagnersMeistersinger: Performance, History, Representation, ed. NicholasVaszonyi (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 19091.

91. Horst Weber, Das Fremde im Eignenen: Zum Wandel des Wagnerbildes im Exil,in Wagner im Dritten Reich, 215; Spotts, Hitler, 24044.

92. Hans Rudolf Vaget, National and Universal: Thomas Mann and the Paradox ofGerman Music, in Music and German National Identity, 15577.

93. Ernst Bloch, Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormrz(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,1970), 320.


29/29

Reproducedwithpermissionof thecopyrightowner. Further reproductionprohibitedwithoutpermission.

Documents

Potter_What_is_Nazi_Music.pdf