Overview
In this authoritative study, one of the first to appear in English, Erik
Levi explores the ambiguous relationship between music and politics during
one of the darkest periods of recent cultural history. Utilising material
drawn from contemporary documents, journals and newspapers, he traces the
evolution of reactionary musical attitudes which were exploited by the Nazis
in the final years of the Weimar Republic, chronicles the mechanisms that
were established after 1933 to regiment musical life throughout Germany and
the occupied territories, and examines the degree to which the climate of
xenophobia, racism and anti-modernism affected the dissemination of music
either in the opera house and concert hall, or on the radio and in the media.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-349-24582-6
Details
Contents
List of Tables and Figures VIII
Acknowledgements IX
Introduction XI
1 Conservative Musical Reaction in the Weimar Republic, 1919-33 1
Reactionary musical attitudes, 1919-23 3
The re-opening of Bayreuth and the Zeitschrift fur Musik 5
The rise of National Socialism and its influence upon musical life 8
2 Music and State Control 14
Towards the Gleichschaltung (Co-ordination) of musical life: the struggle
between Goebbels and Rosenberg 15
Goebbels, the Reichsmusikkammer and the Ministry of Propaganda, 1934-9 24
Obstacles to Goebbels's authority 34
Music and state control during the War 36
3 Anti-Semitism 39
The Removal of the Jews: 1933 and beyond 41
The Kulturbund deutscher Juden and music in the Ghetto 49
Anti-Semitic musical propaganda 57
Redrawing the repertoire: the Aryanisation of music 70
4 Entartete Musik: The War Against Modernism 82
The Nazi purge of modernist repertoire in 1933 85
The Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV): a test case 89
The Entartete Musik Exhibition 94
Internationalism 98
Atonality 102
Neue Sachlichkeit: Hindemith and other Germans 107
Jazz 119
5 Technology Serves Music: Radio and Recording during the Third Reich 124
The radio 126
Recording 139
6 Responding to the Market: Music Publishing in the Third Reich 147
Politicised music publications 149
The suppression of Jewish music publishers 156
The pre-eminence of Schott 159
Successes of the period and its legacy 163
7 Confonnity or Challenge: The Opera House in the Third Reich 166
Opera in the Weimar Republic, 1927-33 166
The Nazi take-over: from Preussischer Theaterausschuss to Reichstheaterkammer
170
The Reichstheaterkammer; limitations of bureaucracy and artistic policy in
Dresden, Frankfurt and Berlin 175
Perspectives of repertoire, 1933-45 182
An overall assessment of operatic repertoire in the Third Reich 191
8 Continuity or Change: The Symphony Orchestra and its Repertoire 195
The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra 197
Orchestras in Dresden, Leipzig, Hamburg and Munich 203
The Kampfbund Orchestras and the National Socialist Reichs Symphony Orchestra
207
Orchestras in the occupied territories 210
A general note about repertoire 215
9 Rewriting Musical History: Music Literature and the Musical Press 220
The racial argument 221
Music histories after 1933 223
Musical biographies 226
The musical press, 1933-39 228
The musical press during the war 237
Notes and References 243
Glossary 265
Chronology 267
Bibliography 281
Index 286
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
6.1 Number of political music publications, 1929-38 150
7.1 Number of musicians contracted at German theatres, 1932-8 181
7.2 The five most popular operatic composers, 1932-40 192
7.3 The most popular operas, 1932-3 and 1938-9 193
8.1 Number of twentieth-century composers performed by the Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra 216
8.2 The most performed composers of orchestral musiC 217
8.3 Random sample of orchestral repertoire outside Berlin 218
Figures
2.1 Hierarchical structure of the Reichs Chamber of Culture from government
to regional level 25
2.2 Initial structure of the Reichs Chamber of Music 27
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank numerous people who have nurtured me in the
writing of this book. Amongst the various libraries who have
proved so helpful and obliging in answering all my queries, the
staff of the Wiener Library in London, in particular, deserve a
special mention for providing me with valuable archival and
press material. I would also like to thank Jeremy Upton and
Dr Christopher Grogan~ both librarians of the music department
of Royal Holloway, University of London, who searched
for and located much material which is not easily accessible in
this country. Amongst those who took a personal interest in the
text of my book I must thank, first and foremost, Andrew
Bickley whose constructive criticisms have proved invaluable at
every stage. In the thorny question of translating some extremely
complicated German texts, I am most grateful to my
father, Felix Levi, and Dr Hans Heimler for their patience and
expertise. Finally, I must thank my wife Joanne and my children
Micaela and Francesca for putting up with so much in the
difficult birth of this book.
Introduction
The function of the arts in a repressive political system such as
the Third Reich has always exercised considerable fascination
amongst cultural historians. Yet since 1945, there has been
something of an imbalance in the levels of scrutiny afforded to
the different art forms during the Nazi era. In purely statistical
terms, there can be no doubt that most attention has been
drawn to the visual arts and architecture. For example, the
bibliography The Nazi Era. 1919-1945, edited by Helen Kehr
and Janet Langmaid (London, 1982), lists nearly twenty postwar
books dealing with art history, and eight concerned with
architecture. Next to these areas, the role of the media, especially
film, has also elicited comprehensive and detailed examination.
In comparison, music seems to have attracted far less
exposure and, to date, only a handful of books in the German
language have been exclusively concerned with the subject.
These are Musik im dritten Reich ( 1962) by Joseph Wulf, Musik im
NS-Staat ( 1982) by Fred Prieberg, Musik und Musikpolitik im
faschistischenDeutschland (1984) edited by Hanns-Werner Heister
and Hans-Gunter Klein, and Entartete Musik (1988) edited by
Albrecht Diimling and Peter Girth.
Given Germany's undisputed historical pre-eminence in both
the performing and creative aspects of music, the paucity of
scholarly material on musical life in Nazi Germany appears to
be somewhat surprising. But there are perhaps special reasons
why, amongst all the arts, it is music that has remained relatively
neglected. One explanation must surely rest with the very abstract
nature of music as an art form. This poses special difficulties
for any historian who seeks to draw unambiguous parallels
between music and political ideology, difficulties which appear,
at least on the surface, to be far less problematical in the visual
arts or film. At the same time, it would be misleading to suggest
that connections cannot be drawn. No one would dispute that
socio-political factors have some bearing on the composition,
performance and reception of music in any period. But attempts
at arriving at a precise definition of the political complexion
of a particular piece of music, especially one which is divorced
from a specified text or programme, still prove elusive.
Apart from the fundamental difficulty of articulating the
relationship between music and politics, there are some purely
historical factors which go some way towards explaining why
musical activity in the Third Reich has not been exposed to
such extensive exploration. Perhaps most important in this
respect is the constancy of the German Musical Establishment
from the Weimar Republic to the post-war era, and its vested
interest in suppressing information about its role during the
Nazi era. In most historical surveys of twentieth-century music,
this issue is barely discussed. Rather, musicologists have tended
to focus their attention on the dramatic impact of Hitler's antisemitic
policies which forced the emigration from Germany of
a number of very significant and influential musical figures. In
contrast, the equally valid point that the majority of musicians,
some of incontestable importance, chose to remain and actually
prospered under the Nazis, seems to have been overlooked.
Since many of these musicians preserved their positions of
influence in post-war Germany, strenuous efforts were made to
obstruct detailed investigation of their individual relationships
with the regime.
Of course, there is nothing remarkable about the attempt to
cover up past complicities, and it is certainly not unique to the
field of music. On the other hand, as Fred Prieberg has so
rightly pointed out in his book Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt,
1982), the conspiracy of silence and misinformation about the
Nazi era has extended to some of the most highly respected
academic publications. Prieberg cites as an example the pioneering
music dictionary Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart,
published between 1949 and 1968. This mammoth 14-volume
study, edited by Friedrich Blume, university professor of music
in Kiel during the 1930s, can be found in almost every major
music library. Yet comprehensive information regarding the
activities and outputs of certain composers, performers and
musicologists, who enjoyed prominence during the Third Reich,
is found wanting.
Such deception only compounds the difficulty of painting a
balanced picture of musical life in the Third Reich. Here again
there are historical problems, for in the aftermath of the war
and the horrifying revelations of the Holocaust, it was tempting
for propagandists to taint all cultural activities associated with
the Nazis. Yet of all the arts, music does not provide much
useful ammunition for expounding this argument. Even without
underestimating the cruelty and intolerance of the Nazi
regime, the notion that music entered a twentieth-century equivalent
of the 'Dark Ages' during the Third Reich simply does not
stand up to detailed scrutiny. On the contrary, examination of
certain aspects of musical life in Germany during this period
demonstrates a much greater degree of flexibility and creative
enterprise than is commonly assumed.
This brings me to one of the central preoccupations of my
book, namely the necessity to establish a sense of continuity in
20th-century German music. All too often, it has seemed convenient
simply to view the artistic achievement in the Third
Reich in complete isolation. In such an interpretation, Hitler's
seizure of power in 1933 is seen to have ushered in a period of
intense reaction against artistic modernism, and a return to the
neo-Wagnerian values of the 19th century. But while there are
undoubtedly reactionary elements in German music from 1933-
45, it is also worth pointing out that the Nazis accommodated
and adopted various existing stylistic elements- Gebrauchsmusik
(utilitarian music), Gemeinschaftsmusik (community music), neoclassicism,
the revival of interest in early music - which had
been established during the Weimar Republic. In addition, it
would be misleading to isolate completely musical developments
in Germany during the 1930s from elsewhere in Europe.
The parallel between music in Stalin's Russia and in Hitler's
Germany provides an obvious point of reference. But even in
countries with non-totalitarian political systems, there is sufficient
evidence to point to a less 'modernistic' aspect to contemporary
musical composition than in the 1920s.
Apart from delineating the degree of continuity and change
from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi era, my other major
concern in this book is to trace the complex relationship between
Nazi musical ideology, such as it existed, and its practical
application in the Nazi state. Herein lies one of the major
contradictions of the age. While certain musicologists and critics
proved eager to furnish the regime with biological theories
about the racial superiority of Aryan music and proposed wholesale
changes to the organisation of musical culture in the country,
the actual administrators of music policy carried out their
programmes only intermittently. One of the major problems of
equating theory with practice lay in the diverse cultural aims of
the Nazi hierarchy. Throughout the period, there were clear
divisions of opinion over music policy between Alfred Rosenberg,
the party's appointed ideologue, and Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's
Minister of Propaganda. In this long running dispute, Rosenberg
adopted an entrenched and orthodox ideological attitude, but
in almost every case he was skilfully outwitted by his rival, who
had seized the machinery of government and was perfectly
prepared to subordinate Nazi principles to the political requirements
of propaganda. The conflict was hardly resolved by
Hitler who, at his cultural address to the Nuremberg Party Rally
in 1938, even went so far as to question the validity of National
Socialist theory as applied to music. Because of these seemingly
irreconcilable views, it becomes clear that music policy between
1933 and 1945 was riddled with ambiguities, compromises and
inconsistencies of outlook.
Since my book is concerned first and foremost with policy
and its application, its structure does not follow the line of
many music histories. Readers may well be disappointed to find
that discussion and musical analyses of compositions written
during this period are only touched upon in passing. Neither
have I concentrated much attention on biographical examination
of the equivocal positions of such important musicians as
Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Herbert von Karajan
and Paul Hindemith, fascinating as they are. Rather, I have
preferred to adopt a more generalised approach in this introductory
study, starting with the examination of conservative
attitudes manifested during the Weimar Republic, and then
proceeding to a survey of the regulatory controls of music
during the Third Reich and the policies of anti-semitism and
anti-modernism as applied to music. Mter these substantial
chapters, I have concerned myself with various facets of musical
life in Germany, in particular orchestral and operatic administration
and repertoire, music on the radio, commercial recordings,
music publishing, music journalism and approaches to
musical history. The list of subjects covered has, of necessity,
been selective, and there are numerous other areas- for example,
music and the youth movements, the relationship between
church musician and the Nazi state, and the effects of German
imperialism on the musical life in the occupied territories -
which, for reasons of space, have had to be omitted from the
present survey.
ERIK LEVI