Musicology in the "Third Reich": A Preliminary Report (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
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.
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.
Neglected Muse: Nazi Music Policy
BRILL eBooks, 2023
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
The Impact of Nazism on Twentieth-Century Music
2014
BioOne Complete (complete.BioOne.org) is a full-text database of 200 subscribed and open-access titles in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences published by nonprofit societies, associations, museums, institutions, and presses.
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.
2020
In March 2013, Ulrich Blomann invited a group of academics, musicians, and critics to Hambach Castle for two days of presentations and discussions on the influence of the Cold War on music and culture. This volume, consisting of an introduction by Blomann and fifteen essays, commemorates that event. Blomann’s opening address establishes the premise that German scholars and critics have been insufficiently sensitive to the ways in which the political realities of the Cold War shaped musical ideas and products after 1945. He characterizes this gap in scholarship as a consequence of the West’s “propagandistic” insistence on the link between autonomous art and political freedom and sees the failure to investigate connections between music and politics in this era as a dogmatic avoidance, even a blindness, born out of Germans’ unwillingness to confront the realities of denazification and reconstruction (13). The volume’s essays focus mainly on divided Germany, with brief forays into Nort...