Neglected Muse: Nazi Music Policy (original) (raw)

Spring 1942, the Rositabar on Bayerischer Platz in Berlin. Alongside jazz musician Tullio Mobiglia, who styled himself the most beautiful saxophonist in the world, Jewish guitarist Heinz Jakob Schumann, just eighteen years old, made his debut. The Italian Mobiglia, who had been an apprentice to Coleman Hawkins, and his sextet offered the best swing to be heard in the 'Third Reich'. In the middle of the war, the Berlin nightclub seemed to be a refuge for everyone who wanted to flee the cruel reality of renunciation, loss and persecution. A horde of female admirers had their sights set on the beautiful Tullio, but Schumann also seems to have enjoyed himself amply. That spring of 1942, he was given a nickname by a French friend, who called him Chérie Coco because she couldn't pronounce Heinz; henceforth he was to make his career under the name Coco Schumann.1 One of the regulars at the Rositabar was Heinrich Kupffer, born like Schumann in 1924. Before Kupffer was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1942, he had paid a visit to the jazz club one last time with his 'half-Jewish' girlfriend from Neukölln and may well have enjoyed Mobiglia's and Schumann's swing standards. He had met this woman just a few days earlier. She had already lost her father, though we do not learn how. Yet she had been 'in no way gloomy or withdrawn' , recalled Kupffer, but fully 'involved in the colossal and crazy normality of this city' .2 Of course, the Rositabar was not in the public eye to the same extent as the Berlin Philharmonic, for example. Coco Schumann was nowhere near as wellknown as the likes of Friedrich Hollaender, who had long since left Germany. Furthermore, in the spring of 1942, only a short time after the United States had entered the war, the Nazi regime had other things to do than raid a jazz club in Schöneberg in order to send yet another Jew off to a prison camp; Schumann was admitted to Theresienstadt a year later. Ultimately, this vignette in the Rositabar reflects individual experiences that contrast with the displacement and murder of many Jewish musicians and many more Jewish listeners. And yet Kupffer's 'crazy normality' should be taken seriously as an attempt to describe everyday life in the Nazi state, not least with a view to musical