Eine Institution zwischen Repräsentation und Macht: Die Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst im Kulturleben des Nationalsozialismus ed. by Juri Giannini, Maximilian Haas, and Erwin Strouhal (original) (raw)
Related papers
History of Humanities, 2017
Gopnik had it, can hardly be converted into a lab. From the perspective of the history of the humanities, the legacy of Warburg is certainly not found in the evocation of his specter but rather demands a rethinking of the intellectual, material, and economic conditions that enabled the kind of scholarship he had envisioned. And yet libraries age. Not unlike experimental systems, they experience a loss of ability to facilitate and produce fresh scholarship. If the Warburg is to remain "vital," we have to move beyond antiquarian sentiment: the respect for this monument of scholarship calls for rethinking it in critical terms.
Inaugural Conference of the Institute for Austrian and German Music Research, Surrey, September 2021
In wake of the 1848/49 revolution, the character of Austrian education was modified in order to deal with new challenges such as liberalism and nationalism. Leopold von Thun und Hohenstein, minister of education as of 1849, was tasked to push back liberal forces while at the same time modernizing the dated nature of university education at Austrian teaching facilities. In reacting to increasing nationalist tensions between Austria’s ethnic groups, Thun favoured positivist approaches to art and science, which proved to be modern whilst masking questions of cultural and national identity. This positivist setting presents the backdrop of two new academic disciplines concerned with the arts, with Rudolf von Eitelberger (1852) and Eduard Hanslick (1856) being habilitated and appointed as lecturers at Vienna University. Musicology and art history as academ-ic disciplines in Austria thus form as part of a specific political agenda. My paper will show how both relate to the central question of ‘nation neutral’ science while foster¬ing the idea of shared Austrian culture, reaching from the monarchy’s periphery to Vienna. The apolitical character of Hanslick’s aesthetics, apparently neglect-ing the cultural setting of music, for example, fits this idea as well as his articles for the Kronprinzenwerk, a publication presenting the cultural qualities of the empire’s peoples without priori¬tizing the ‘German’ segment of Austria-Hungary, thereby trying to create a unified cultural consciousness with Franz Joseph I. as a ‘father figure,’ holding together the diversified monarchy. While my paper will mostly address musicology (e.g. the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich), it will show also how art history emerges from the same political setting using the example of Alois Riegl’s Alterswert as an essential criterion in monument preservation that bypasses questions of national meaning and represents a ‘nation neural’ measure of historic relevance.
Musical History As Seen Through Contemporary Eyes, 2021
But the real evil is what causes us speechless horror, when all we can say is: This should never have happened. 1 The totalitarian regime does not need censorship; it prohibits silence and instead insists on singing hymns of freedom in chorus. 2 Newspapers and journals are a crucial part of the core source material of music research. They provide valuable information not merely about the status of musical research, repertoire, performance and reception history but they offer view of the state of society and culture more broadly. This study focuses on early twentieth-century German music periodicals in general, 3 and on the wartime journal Musik im Kriege in particular. This journal was published bimonthly in two volumes only, in 1943 and 1944 (totaling 20 single 1 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. and with an introduction by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 75. 2 "Das totalitäre Regime hat die Zensur nicht nötig; es verbietet das Schweigen und läßt dafür die Hymnen auf die Freiheit im Chor singen." Manès Sperber, Die Achillesferse
2012
In his book on aesthetics and Nazi politics, translated as The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Eric Michaud wrote that the National Socialist attention to the arts was intended "to present the broken Volk with an image of its 'eternal Geist' and to hold up to it a mirror capable of restoring to it the strength to love itself." 1 In preparing the conceptual framework for my own book, just released by Cambridge University Press, I came upon this, among other ideas of Michaud, who is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, somewhat late in the game. His book was originally published by Gallimard in 1996, and then translated into English in 2004. Considering it last year, I found a number of his concepts very intriguing, but was only able to make general references to them in my Introduction and Conclusion. Many of these ideas will be familiar to readers of George L. Mosse, whom Michaud should have cited more vigorously. However, I found that Michaud put some of the key concepts of the History of Nazi Culture more strongly than I have read elsewhere, and also that they seemed to resonate with much of the material I uncovered in my research.
Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea : Imagining North-Eastern Europe. Baltic and Scandinavian states in the eyes of local, regional, and global observers, 2022
Diritti: gli articoli di Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea sono pubblicati sotto licenza Creative Commons 4.0. Possono essere riprodotti e modificati a patto di indicare eventuali modifiche dei contenuti, di riconoscere la paternità dell'opera e di condividerla allo stesso modo. La citazione di estratti è comunque sempre autorizzata, nei limiti previsti dalla legge.
Music and Internationalism in Nazi Germany: Provenance and Post-War Consequences
Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2022
In 1926, Hans Pfitzner attacked a völkerfeindliche Internationalismus ('anti-Volk internationalism') in music, associated with atonality, jazz and other phenomena. For a long time it was assumed by many-not least those involved in post-1945 musical planning in occupied Germany-that this type of ethos informed programming in Nazi Germany, which was said to have been cut off from both modernist and international developments for twelve years. In this article I nuance this view by considering the openness to multiple nationalisms of figures like Hermann Killer and Peter Raabe, and give an overview of the many different crossnational societies, friendship organisations and exchange programmes, and how these were affected by unfolding political events, from the long-term German-Italian and German-Hungarian exchanges prevalent throughout the regime, through those between German and Japan which followed the Anti-Comintern Pact, and the more fragile exchanges with Britain, France, Poland and Russia, to the wartime exchanges with fellow fascist countries such as Romania and Croatia. I consider the activities of the Ständiger Rat für die international Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten and contrast them with the Allgemeiner deutscher Musikverein, the, and the Internationales zeitgenössisches Musikfest in Baden-Baden in terms of different ideologies on nationalism/internationalism. I situate these exchanges in the context of internationalism of the Weimar era (manifested above all in membership of the International Society for Contemporary Music) and consider how misconceptions fuelled the post-1945 notion of Nachholbedarf ('catching up') which was vital to subsequent new music programming.
2011
Recent scholarship on Nazi music policy pays little attention to the main party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, or comparable publications for the general public. Most work concentrates on publications Nazis targeted at expert audiences, in this case music journals. But to think our histories of Nazi music politics are complete without comprehensive analysis of the party daily is premature. One learns from this resource precisely what Nazi propagandists wanted average party members and Germans in general, not just top-level officials and scholars, to think-even about music. Therein, we see how contributors placed a Nazi "spin" on music history and composer's biographies.