Review of Kultur und Musik nach 1945: Ästhetik im Zeichen des Kalten Krieges, edited by Ulrich J. Blomann (original) (raw)
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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
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.
2010
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. Using heretofore untranslated materials, this article will fill part of this gap in our historiography of Nazi music policy. It will first detail Völkischer Beobachter attacks on prominent representatives of musical modernism in the Weimar era. Thereafter, this presentation will cover "acceptable" alternatives to Weimar decadence that the Völkischer Beobachter posited from the so-called Era of Struggle [Kampfzeit ] through the Third Reich. With the war, however, the theme most emphasized in Völkischer Beobachter cultural coverage was militarism. My paper will conclude with a survey of how revered figures such as Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner were scrutinized for indications that they could serve as inspiration for the German Volk at war. "WEIMAR MUSIC" IN THE VÖLKISCHER BEOBACHTER With its outlook so strongly rooted in the romantic German music tradition, what the Völkischer Beobachter found most disgraceful in Weimar culture was cultivation of musical modernism, the whole of which it referred to as, at best, the "farcical imitation of a carnival barker selling a tent full of musical freaks,"[1] and, at worst, " Jewish terror in music."[2] The newspaper stood firm in its rejection of works by "Jews and assorted foreigners" or Germans who supposedly associated with "international, Jewish circles"[3]-applauding "brave acts of resistance" such as when a lone Nazi [Hakenkreuzler] stood up and shouted "pfui" at a concert of Schoenberg, Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Bartok.[4] The "musical foreigner" whom the Völkischer Beobachter derided most was Igor Stravinsky. While an early attack identified him as a "spiritual Polack," [5] Fritz Stege described Stravinsky as a "Russian composer with half-Asiatic instincts hidden under the cover of French civilization" who simply knew how to
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.