In 1981, the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, the official society of German musicologists, held its first formal session on the subject of “Music in the 1930s.” Rudolf Stephan, then president of the society, concluded his opening remarks with the following admonition:
Whoever concerns himself with the music and musical life of the Third Reich must ask himself: Did National Socialism make any contribution to music history? Did it achieve anything more than the nameless suffering of countless innocents? More than the (premature) death of many people, including musicians? Maybe it prevented the creation of several masterpieces; [but] it played no role in those masterpieces that did arise. (It found them repulsive). It created nothing positive, it only destroyed. It only furthered the already long-observed process of returning humanity to barbarism. Nothing more and nothing less.Footnote 1
Stephan's remarks came at a pivotal moment in Germany's musical Vergangenheitsbewältigung, as the younger generation had finally won a hard-fought battle to end the silence on music in the Third Reich. Still, their elders were advising them not to abandon assumptions that had served post-war musical life so well for so long: that Nazi musical life existed within a strict totalitarian dictatorship, and that music produced within Germany's borders between 1933 and 1945 was aesthetically inferior. Moreover, they were being warned to be mindful of the moral responsibilities of the work they were about to undertake and advised, implicitly, that one would serve a higher moral purpose by attending to the victims rather than the perpetrators.
In the twenty-five years since these proclamations were made, the history of music in the Third Reich has been written by historians and musicologists on both sides of the Atlantic from a variety of perspectives, but the assumptions implicit in the statement above have been surprisingly resilient even in the most recent investigations, and even in the face of mounting evidence that erodes their credibility. The presumptions that Nazi musical life was subsumed under a totalitarian system with a central ideology that dictated musical taste, accompanied by complementary intentionalist assumptions of Hitler's direct intervention in musical matters, have proven to be far more tenacious in the study of music in the Third Reich than perhaps in most other areas of historical inquiry. An image has emerged of a dystopia in which all musical activity was strictly controlled by a core of ruthless dictators and a few willing collaborators, and in which all music produced was artistically impoverished. This prevailing image has not only inhibited a more accurate assessment of the nature and function of musical life in the Third Reich but has also had the more widespread effect of excising an entire chapter from the history of music in Germany. The canon of German music history—by tacitly honoring the admonitions to assume the worst about any music produced within Nazi Germany and to privilege the music of all who can be regarded as victims—has virtually erased the Nazi years, sketching a narrative that jumps from Weimar-era experimentation to the exile activities of those who fled the Third Reich.Footnote 2
The dystopian image may have served a necessary function for the initial inquiries into this dark chapter of Germany's otherwise illustrious music history, yet it has clearly outlived its usefulness in the wake of debates among historians on the nature of totalitarianism, Alltagsgeschichte, and the role of Hitler. Nevertheless historians of music in the Third Reich have been hard-pressed to venture beyond notions of a central Nazi ideology steering musical politics and aesthetics, a heavy reliance on totalitarian and intentionalist models, and protracted discussions of individual culpability. The following investigation will first examine as background the special position of music in the German cultural legacy that both generated the dystopian image in the early post-war years and rendered certain modes of inquiry off-limits. It will then survey the historiography of music in the Third Reich, considering how a late start and the tenacity of unstable paradigms have caused confusion, especially as mounting evidence challenges old assumptions. Finally, a number of alternate approaches will be explored that might lead to a more nuanced understanding of this period of Germany's rich and complicated music history. Music's historically privileged position in German culture may have protected it from the type of probing investigations pursued in other areas of Nazi history, but dwelling on the same questions has led only to dead ends, making it necessary to formulate new questions that can accommodate the wealth of evidence accumulated in recent years.
German Music's Privileged Position
For centuries, the central location of German-speaking territories and their long history as the crossroads of European culture gave rise to one of the most cosmopolitan musical landscapes on the continent. The multiplicity of small principalities, each with its own musical institutions, led to the creation of an impressive number of concert halls, opera houses, and conservatories that still dot the German landscape, accounting for what may arguably be the largest per capita number of musical venues in the world. German patrons had a long history of attracting foreign musical luminaries to their courts, and pundits gradually recast this eclectic musical culture as a homegrown German product, creating an idealized concept of “German music” that came to play a central role in discussions of German identity. Statesmen, too, began to recognize music as a rich cultural treasure, and their participation in emphasizing the national significance of music took on grand proportions after 1871.Footnote 3 This led to the notion that the still amorphous “German” nation was a “people of music” (Volk der Musik) and its music was distinguished by its “universality.”Footnote 4
It was not long before this boisterous claim to being the “people of music” became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as public and private support helped Germany's various music enterprises enhance tourism, export, and the international cultural stature of the German state. The growing reputation of Germans as leaders of the musical world blossomed further in the nineteenth century not only with the establishment of a thriving music-publishing industry, but also with innovations in music education and scholarship and the widespread growth of amateur music-making. Educators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued to emphasize the importance of music as a component of Bildung and focused increasingly on the cultivation of specifically German repertoire, while the greatest advances in the development of the musicology discipline were concentrated in the Austro-German sphere.Footnote 5 Ordinary German citizens also began to claim ownership of the German musical legacy from the 1870s on, as amateur music groups devoted to the promotion of German music proliferated.Footnote 6
Political leadership in several successive regimes recognized music as a valuable commodity and one that needed to be preserved, but also with few exceptions generally refrained from tampering excessively with its success and left much of its growth and development to the practitioners themselves. This was true even of the Nazis, as will be argued below, as well as the occupying forces after World War II, who, despite their mistrust of the German cultural elite, nevertheless harbored a deeply ingrained respect for German music and placed a high priority on getting Germany's musical life back on its feet, often with breakneck speed. With the exception of the American Military Government, they even allowed for leading figures in Nazi musical life to be spared from prolonged denazification proceedings. Especially after jurisdiction was transferred to the German Spruchkammern from 1946 until the end of denazification in 1948, a large number of prominent musical figures managed to glide through the proceedings and thereafter to hide from the world the successes they had enjoyed in Hitler's Germany, continuing to lead illustrious careers in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 7 Musicians such as Herbert von Karajan, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Carl Orff could easily exonerate themselves by claiming to have remained above politics throughout the Nazi years, a claim that most of the public wanted to believe.
The music professions' almost seamless transition from the Nazi years to the post-war years was also facilitated by the music community's more “official” position, which strove to emphasize the differences between the recent past and the immediate future, in effect constructing a musical “zero hour.” The notion of the “zero hour” (Stunde Null) had gained currency among a younger group of cultural figures who wished to distance themselves from those who had lived through the Third Reich.Footnote 8 In the music world, it was marked by a conscious effort to reanimate the music allegedly silenced by Nazism, to depart from what was construed to be a Nazi aesthetic that left music vulnerable to propagandistic exploitation, and to reimagine the recent past as a police state in which music and musicians were forced into submission. This creation of a Nazi musical dystopia served the purpose of sanitizing all that was to emerge in the new German states as a welcome departure from the horrors of the past.
As the dominant impulse of the Adenauer years was to move ahead and rebuild without looking back, questions of how the intolerable conditions of such a dystopia could have ever arisen or effectively persisted were of little immediate interest. The subject of music and musicians in the Third Reich, in fact, remained explicitly off-limits for an entire generation. Professors admonished their students not to pursue any investigations into this dark period of history, insisting that the students lacked the necessary qualifications because they had not experienced the times first-hand.Footnote 9 Biographies, both scholarly and non-scholarly, of prominent musical figures frequently glossed over the Nazi years entirely. The political activities of a few of the most prominent such as Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler could hardly escape notice, but most of the others quietly evaded scrutiny, and anyone hoping to uncover the secrets of the likes of Karajan or Schwarzkopf met with obstacles from archivists, families, and the individuals themselves.Footnote 10
Justice for Victims and Perpetrators
The first challenge to the immunity enjoyed by musicians came with the publication in 1963 and 1964 of several volumes of documents on cultural activities in the Third Reich collected by historian Joseph Wulf and including one volume on music.Footnote 11 Wulf, a concentration camp survivor and member of the Jewish resistance, revealed scandalous details about the complicity of leading West German cultural figures but was so hounded by the cultural establishment (in the music world, certain leading musicologists had branded him a liarFootnote 12) that he ended up taking his own life in 1974.Footnote 13 Thereafter, two American dissertations in history appeared in 1970 but remained largely unnoticed for many years.Footnote 14 Things then began to change owing largely to the efforts of the “68ers,” members of the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s whose parents were adults during the Third Reich.Footnote 15 While political and social protests preoccupied American youth during the Vietnam War, German students focused on implementing educational reforms as well as putting an end to the silence surrounding the Nazi years. Students of musicology, attracted to the teachings of Theodor Adorno, staged a rebellion against the older generation and demanded more openness to Marxist approaches and a confrontation with the recent past. Thus in 1974, students organized a “Forum of Democratic Musicology” concurrent with the annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, addressing several topics dealing with the Nazi years and opening the door to later investigations of Bayreuth's Wagner festival during the Third Reich, music of the youth movement, and exiled composers.Footnote 16 The musicology establishment remained reluctant to support such enterprises, yet many of these “68ers” defied the warnings of the older generation. Finally in 1981, when some of these students held faculty positions of their own, the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, presided over by Rudolf Stephan, organized the aforementioned session touching on the topic, albeit under the somewhat evasive rubric of “Music of the 1930s” and not limited to Germany.Footnote 17
When researchers finally gained entry into archives and started to publish their results beginning in the 1980s, their pent-up frustration over limited archival access fused with an intense anger toward the silence of the preceding years, and some of the most detailed investigations of this history seem to be driven almost exclusively by a desire to track down surreptitious offenders and hold them accountable for their unpunished crimes. Such was the case with Fred K. Prieberg's Musik im NS-Staat,Footnote 18 a thoroughly researched yet haphazardly organized exploration of music and musicians that hardly conceals the author's rage. Prieberg faced many obstacles in acquiring materials and gaining access to archives, only to discover mountains of evidence that challenged the innocence claims of individuals he had interviewed, as well as questioning the extent to which “forbidden” music was actually suppressed, and the extent to which the government had terrorized practicing musicians.Footnote 19 Faced with so many facts that contradicted received wisdoms, Prieberg's natural reaction was to go to the opposite extreme. Rather than continuing to presume the innocence of the majority of musicians who lived through the Third Reich and went on to prosper after 1945, Prieberg set out on a mission to prove that the opposite was true and that guilt was far more widespread than innocence. This goal led him to lapse into polemics throughout much of his study, yielding a profusion of black-and-white portraits of incorrigible Nazis and a desire to expose them once and for all. His assertions did not go unchallenged, of course, and passionate debates especially over some of the most prominent figures raged on. His revelations about Richard Strauss, for example, sparked controversies that have yet to cease.Footnote 20
This and much of the work that followed seemed to focus more and more on the crudely formulated question “who was a Nazi?” and to draw in broad strokes from the classifications of guilt and innocence crafted in the denazification proceedings. Despite the obvious flaws in the denazification process, the silence of the post-war years precluded any opportunities to develop a more sophisticated mechanism for analyzing an individual's actions within the Nazi system. The stark antagonism of “Nazi” versus “non-Nazi” abated somewhat with the consideration of such mitigating factors as an individual's nationalism, conservatism, retreat into “inner emigration,”Footnote 21 “apolitical” nature, purely artistic priorities, or veiled resistance, but these added classifications hardly ventured beyond the black-gray-white lists established by the Allies in the summer of 1945 and the slightly more gradated categories (major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers, and guiltless) imposed by the German Spruchkammern in spring 1946.Footnote 22
Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, young musicologists, emboldened by Prieberg, continued on his path of probing the political and moral engagement of individuals (primarily composers) but soon moved to less confrontational and more morally sanctioned terrain by investigating the “good Germans” (persecuted Jews, Communists, and all who left Nazi Germany for whatever reason). This new avenue of research launched large and well-organized initiatives bearing such names as “Exilforschung” (“Exile Research”), “Entartete Musik” (“Degenerate music”), and “Verdrängte Musik” (“Suppressed Music”) and produced dozens of publications, exhibitions, and recordings. The purpose here was not only to expose the cruelties and injustices meted out to these individuals but, in the case of composers, also to rediscover and revive their silenced musical works. There was a tacit understanding that all composers who left Nazi Germany, for whatever reason, were morally upstanding and therefore worthy of having their works taken seriously, and that their music came to represent progressiveness, both musical and political.Footnote 23 All others were deemed morally suspect and therefore artistically unworthy of such attention, as their music most certainly must have represented regressive Nazi kitsch at best and racist or nationalist propaganda at worst.
Signs of the imminent breakdown of rigid classifications were on the horizon by the 1980s, as isolated studies on individual composers began to chip away at assumptions about the moral-rectitude-cum-musical-progressiveness of émigrés, as opposed to the moral-culpability-cum-musical-conservatism of those who stayed behind. In the famous case of émigré composer Paul Hindemith, evidence came to light about his close associations with leading members of Alfred Rosenberg's Combat League for German Culture, his promotion of his opera Mathis der Maler as a decidedly German work, and his momentary rise to prominence as one of the leading composers of Nazi Germany. The spate of attacks he endured at the hands of Nazi leaders arose out of political rivalries beyond his control rather than any heroic acts of resistance on his part. To the contrary, Hindemith tried relentlessly to defend himself from these character assassinations by using his political connections, inviting Hitler to attend one of his composition classes, and—in consultation with his publisher—defending his work by contrasting it with the “sonic orgies” of émigrés Kurt Weill, Ernst Krenek, and Arnold Schoenberg.Footnote 24 Further research on the political engagement of Hindemith and others continued to problematize the traditional black-and-white categories of victims and perpetrators, leading to the conclusions that a musician's fate depended on a certain degree of talent, fortuitous political connections, and sheer luck.Footnote 25
Such revelations, however, have only intensified debates by challenging the advocates of traditional “victims” to defend their subjects even more vociferously. These debates heat up especially in the case of composers, for they rest on the apprehension that labeling a composer as a “Nazi” simultaneously condemns that composer's work to silence by excising it from the music-historical canon. In 1999 Michael Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller organized a symposium on music in the Third Reich “in order to complete unfinished business” after the Orff Center apparently refused to publish the proceedings of a conference where Kater revealed Orff's compromising behavior in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 26 The Carl Orff Center was deeply invested in the study of Orff's life and works and, given the climate that had prevailed since the end of the war, must have wished to preserve his image in order to protect him and his works from being considered morally suspect and unworthy of further study. And even at Kater and Riethmüller's conference the debates persisted, for example, as the director of the Hindemith Institute in Frankfurt dismissed any past “incriminating” findings about the composer and scrutinized the reception history of Mathis der Maler in an effort to demonstrate the work's inherently “antifascist” nature.Footnote 27
While isolated studies of individual figures have further highlighted the complexity of how musicians lived and worked in Nazi Germany,Footnote 28 these have not been sufficiently widespread or influential to overturn the post-war categories of guilt and innocence. As a result, the cases of Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan still grab our attention,Footnote 29 while the canon of twentieth-century German music still largely privileges the works of morally “good” composers while condemning the morally “bad” to silence. Given these circumstances, whenever doubt is cast on the victimhood of figures such as Orff or Hindemith, those invested in the study and proliferation of their works understandably feel compelled to launch a defensive to save them from the same oblivion to which the majority of “Nazi composers” have been condemned. This, however, not only skews our perceptions about these composers, but also creates a large void by overlooking the music produced within Germany's borders between 1933 and 1945, creating confusion about the meaning of musical modernism and nationalism and overlooking ripe opportunities to trace continuities and developments of musical style both within and beyond Germany.
“Music under the Nazis”
While many soon began to move beyond ad hominem attacks and tried to investigate the circumstances in which these individuals worked and lived, this pursuit, too, was hampered by a prevailing image that all musical activity was strictly controlled by a core of philistine dictators; in short, a classic representation of totalitarianism. The historical interpretation of Nazi Germany as totalitarian state—dating back to the early post-war writings of Hannah Arendt and resting on presumptions that Nazi Germany adhered to a central ideology, maintained a single mass party, functioned as a police state, and monopolized the media and the economy as a wholeFootnote 30—gained currency among Western historians during the Cold War as a way of highlighting similarities between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union but fell out of favor with the New Left, who adopted the position of East bloc historians equating Nazism with fascism and linked the movement inextricably with capitalism.Footnote 31 Paradoxically, however, the conservative notions of totalitarianism were so tenacious in music circles that they led only to confusion among the generation of musicologists who would otherwise align themselves with the New Left.Footnote 32 Despite their attraction to the Frankfurt School and their desire to break down the obstacles posed by the old guard of musicology, many of the '68ers embraced a language consisting of a curious mixture of both the totalitarianism and fascism concepts. In the end, the totalitarian model, clearly favored by the older generation of historians, ironically also served as a foundation for the rebellious younger generation, this, despite Wulf's ample evidence that challenged the notion of totalitarianism by diminishing the claims of forced compliance and raising the possibility of more widespread voluntary cooperation on the part of active musicians.
Such confusion permeated the 1984 collection Musik und Musikpolitik im faschistischen Deutschland, edited by Hanns-Werner Heister and Hans-Günter Klein. Here the new generation of scholars wished to supplement Prieberg's focus on classical music with investigations into other facets of musical life, guided by the “dictum of Max Horkheimer that whoever refuses to speak about capitalism must also remain silent about fascism.”Footnote 33 Yet the only traces of such New Left historical methodologies lie in the work's overall attempt to turn to social history and to look more (though not exclusively) at amateur activities than Prieberg had done. The contributors thankfully steered away from Prieberg's vindictive tone, but much of their work betrayed a tension among a number of conflicting agendas: to view Nazi Germany as a totalitarian system, to pay homage to Marxist historians and the fascism concept, and to rationalize all of this with evidence that often failed to support either interpretation.
The almost subconscious reliance on the totalitarian concept comes through in numerous contributions, even when the evidence presented indicates instead that any attempts to enforce “ideological” measures on the choice of musical repertoire, practices, or personnel usually had to yield to public opinion or resulted in no perceptible changes at all. Henry Bair, for example, speaks of “hidden ideology” and “veiled threats from Hitler and Goebbels” that led to the alleged capitulation of the Berlin opera houses, but goes on to show instead the ineffectiveness of any attempts to steer these houses toward conformity and the far stronger influence of public opinion (in the form of box office receipts) on opera repertoire. Even in the rare situation of Berlin, where top Nazi officials had direct involvement in these institutions (Goebbels, as Gauleiter of Berlin, oversaw the former city opera in Charlottenburg, and Goering as Prussian Ministerpräsident had jurisdiction over the Prussian State Opera), Goebbels had to ease up on his campaign to limit his opera house's repertoire to German works, leading to an actual reduction of Wagner performances, and other opera houses simply ignored similar “orders” to emphasize contemporary German works.Footnote 34 Hans-Günter Klein similarly struggles to support the notion of a “Nazi ideology” for new opera compositions, observing instead that no clear “Nazi opera theory” ever existed.Footnote 35 Other essays in the same collection offer even more evidence challenging the totalitarian concept, showing instead the concessions made to the radio-listening public, the failures to impose restrictions on the recording industry, and the brazenness of choral groups not only to perform the works of “forbidden” composers such as the Jew Felix Mendelssohn but also to publicize them.Footnote 36
The more concrete efforts in this collection to pay homage to Marxist historical interpretations—by giving more attention to amateur activities, for example—run up against even more problems, especially in pursuing their desire to mythologize the musical arm of the workers' movement. One heart-wrenching account of the fate of the workers' music movement relies mainly on the questionable reports of eyewitnesses, exaggerates certain acts as evidence of “resistance” (such as the refusal to contribute to the government-sponsored winter relief fund), and downplays the methods by which many of these groups managed to survive: changing their names, hiring new conductors, revamping their repertoire, and even harboring SA men among their membership.Footnote 37 Another essay in the same volume, however, offers much conflicting evidence that even shows how the workers' choral organization, the Deutscher Arbeiter Sängerbund, initially supported the Nazis and intended to annex itself to the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF), the mass organization that took control of all pre-existing labor unions.Footnote 38
Prompted by the heightened interest in the subject, publications on music in the Third Reich started to appear en masse in the 1990s. Michael Meyer, author of one of the two history dissertations that appeared in 1970, expanded his work in 1991 by taking into account much of Prieberg's evidence and came to the conclusion that no specific Nazi aesthetic ever existed, and the favor or disfavor meted out to musicians had more to do with their personal and political connections than with their music.Footnote 39 Alan Steinweis's 1993 study on the Reich Culture Chambers, a substantial part of which was devoted to music, further weakened the dystopian image. It revealed not only the chaotic nature of Nazi cultural policy hiding behind a veneer of orderliness, but also the numerous concessions on the part of Goebbels to appeal to the demands of music professions in the early years of the regime, an overall laxity and inconsistency in establishing any aesthetic guidelines, and the ineffectiveness of attempts to censor music.Footnote 40 Michael Kater's three monographs on music in the Third Reich supplied additional evidence of the widespread lack of control in cultural policy and constant infighting among Nazi potentates; the failure, despite relentless propaganda, to devise clear guidelines for distinguishing between “good” and “bad” music; and, in the case of jazz, a pragmatic policy of balancing suppression with toleration, bending ideological principles in order to appease popular tastes.Footnote 41 The 1995 study on opera by German musicologist Michael Walter offered some of the most indisputable challenges to the dystopian paradigm. After years of scholars looking overwhelmingly to opera to detect a specific Nazi musical aesthetic,Footnote 42 Walter revealed the stark inconsistencies between the pronouncements against “degeneracy” and the new operatic works that thrived—and even won Hitler's praise—in the Third Reich, despite their atonal and jazz-inspired scores that were directly reminiscent of works by Schoenberg, Krenek, and Weill.Footnote 43 Walter also challenged the totalitarian concept as applied to music and pointed to the inability during the twelve years of the Third Reich to arrive at any consistent music policy, operatic or otherwise.Footnote 44 Finally, Walter undermined the notion of Hitler's central role in musical policy by showing that in his longest and most public excursus on music, a speech at the 1938 Nuremberg Party Rally, Hitler openly declared that music was thoroughly incapable of expressing political values, nor was it expected to do so.Footnote 45 More and more evidence came to suggest that Nazi leaders, like their predecessors, valued the centrality of music in Germany's culture so much that they were willing to grant composers and musicians a considerable degree of personal and political leeway.Footnote 46
Still, a full twenty years after the first groundbreaking attempts to write the history of music in the Third Reich (forty years if counted back to Wulf's document collections), new evidence continued to undermine the insistence on clinging to the dystopian image. As two conference reports appearing in 1999 and 2003 revealed, a significant number of inquiries still sought connections between a central “Nazi ideology” and its effects on music and aesthetics, investigating how the dictatorship controlled musical life, rather than asking whether such control existed. In the 1999 conference report Die dunkle Last, which grew out of two gatherings on music of the Third Reich and on the question of a musical “zero hour,” some contributors persisted in trying to pinpoint the parameters of an elusive Nazi musical ideology, looking beyond the traditional sources into broader realms of philosophy and aesthetics, but still relying on questionable assumptions about the consistency of Nazi ideology and its effects on music. One finds, for example, an attempt to contrast the philosophical tracts of Adorno and Alfred Rosenberg (but not necessarily drawing on their writings on music), a survey of antirationalist thinking that primarily cites non-music related writings (except for those of composer Hans Pfitzner), and an attempt to tease out the “specific fascist syntax” in the writings of the church composer Hugo Distler.Footnote 47 One also finds examinations of curious musical artifacts, such as a study of the “ideological” significance of the harmonica.Footnote 48 These stand in stark contrast to other essays in the same collection that challenge the uniqueness of Nazi ideology, for example, by tracing persistent strains of anti-Semitism in music literature after 1945. Several more essays begin to discard the question of “who is a Nazi,” in one case going so far as to deconstruct the hagiography of Kurt Huber, who was executed for his participation in the White Rose student resistance movement for drafting and distributing pamphlets urging German citizens to defy the Nazi leadership, and in another examining the conflicting reception of composer Rudolf Wagner-Régeny, who managed to rise to prominence and win praise in both Nazi Germany and the GDR.Footnote 49
The same incongruities characterize the 2003 report, Music and Nazism, resulting from Kater and Riethmüller's conference. Here the old assumptions about Nazi ideology, totalitarianism, and the omnipotence of Hitler converge in Reinhold Brinkmann's exploration on the symphony. Brinkmann, himself one of the first scholars of his generation to break the silence on music in the Third Reich, combs through Mein Kampf, Hitler's earlier speeches, and the writings of Alfred Rosenberg and of a handful of music critics to demonstrate how the “symphonic genres could so easily be used for the purpose of ideology.”Footnote 50 He then supports the totalitarian concept with the presumption of “composers being forced to create monumental compositions that would embody the National Socialist agenda,” and relies heavily on an article by an obscure, “typically fascist” author for much of his evidence.Footnote 51 Other contributions to the same volume, however, offer even more evidence to undermine these assumptions. Guido Heldt reveals the term “ideology” to be overused and misconstrued despite its attractiveness as a concept, showing how most attempts to grasp it have led only to dead ends.Footnote 52 Hitler's role is shown to be grossly exaggerated in evaluating the reception of Wagner and in piecing together the downfall of Richard Strauss.Footnote 53 The dystopian image receives further blows, first for resting on inaccurate assumptions that politics was central to daily existence and that music was central to political agendas,Footnote 54 and most graphically with a Goebbels quote from November 1943, in which he states, “I have decided to lift these restrictions on German intellectual life [Geistesleben] as soon as possible after the war. Every act of censorship by officials threatens the free development of cultural life. It also contradicts the idea of the Reich Culture Chamber, which is to guide cultural production, not micromanage it.”Footnote 55
Looking Ahead
Post-war music historians found themselves in a particularly precarious situation, for music's privileged position in German culture had not only prevailed during the Third Reich but became even more firmly entrenched in the post-war decades. “German music” had become a highly marketable commodity, as the vibrancy of Germany's concert halls, opera houses, conservatories, music-publishing houses, and recording companies continued to rival international competitors.Footnote 56 This situation could only prosper, however, under the delusion of a musical “zero hour,” and any evidence hinting at the Nazi-era successes of surviving musical institutions, industries, or individuals would not only pique the ire of those implicated but would also potentially jeopardize the “new” Germany's appeal to the international musical marketplace. Music historians cooperated by default in constantly reiterating the litany of questions that, by their very formulation, had protected the post-war German musical community: 1) who was a Nazi? 2) how did Nazi ideology bring about the temporary decline of German music? and 3) how did the Nazi dictatorship control all aspects of musical life? These questions have managed to linger, despite the obvious and not-so-obvious problems inherent in their formulation, and need to be qualified if not entirely replaced. The focus on individuals needs to take into account new perspectives revealed by more recent views on the mechanisms of coercion and the special position of German music, but more importantly needs to be broadened to embrace the entire music community as an entity. Second, rather than asking how Nazi ideology brought about a decline, which presumes a coherent Nazi ideology as well as the inferiority of “Nazi music,” we should first consider whether that was even the case. Finally, rather than resting on the totalitarian model and focusing on the efficacy of control mechanisms, one needs to consider, instead, that musical life might have actually prospered under Nazi rule.
Who was a Nazi?
This question may have arisen from the perceived moral obligation to mete out justice, and while moral considerations are far from irrelevant, this focus is fraught with problems and has too often diverted the discussion away from larger concerns. The term “Nazi,” first of all, has become a common shorthand that unfortunately oversimplifies the complexity of political engagement: Did one earn the designation of “Nazi,” for example, simply by joining the National Socialist party? Strauss's and Hans Pfitzner's detractors would say no, since neither ever joined the party, but many believe they are nonetheless to be vilified as Nazis.Footnote 57 Conversely party membership alone would brand the White Rose martyr Kurt Huber as a Nazi.Footnote 58 Furthermore, the commonplace assignment of responsibility to an amorphous group of “Nazis” confounds the question of agency by failing to situate the actions of specific individuals, government agencies, party organizations, or private interests.
It has become clear that only after we have a better sense of the overall infrastructure of music politics can we adequately assess the responses of individuals. The intense scrutiny of individuals will not cease, however—especially in the case of composers, where the stakes have remained so high—but further inquiries should consider the volatility of success in the arbitrary political climate of the Third Reich, the privileged position of musicians, and the degree of Narrenfreiheit allowed to celebrities and creative individuals. Just as post-war musical luminaries eluded accusations of Nazi collaboration, so, too, did such tolerance show itself on occasion under the Nazi leadership. Despite the climate of racism, xenophobia, and denunciation, there are famous instances of Jewish and otherwise “unacceptable” music celebrities continuing their careers in high-profile venues, even right under the noses of Goering and Goebbels in their capacities as protectors of Berlin's orchestras and opera houses.Footnote 59 These facts do not mitigate the impact of persecution in the music world but clearly complicate the impression of ideological zeal at work.
One also has to consider the generation to which an individual belonged: Richard Strauss, having worked under several different types of systems, arguably underestimated Hitler by thinking he could simply show respect in return for artistic freedom, but he also detected a degree of progressivism in the new government's promises to musicians of new professional and economic securities and unprecedented attention to his own pet project, copyright laws. A younger generation of musicians who started their careers in the severe economic turmoil of the Weimar Republic may have jumped at any opportunities that came their way in the Third Reich, ingratiating themselves with party and government benefactors after experiencing such extreme financial insecurity firsthand. The generation that followed, a group educated in the Nazi system, similarly has to be seen in light of the intense efforts during the Third Reich to reform education and indoctrinate young Germans. Members of this generation may come across as the most ardent and convinced National Socialists, losing their faith only after the final phases of World War II and finding themselves at a loss to rationalize their early education with the new rules implicitly set down at the “zero hour.”
Along the same lines, musicians need to be regarded not merely as individuals but as part of a musical community that transcended social, economic, and professional categories and that, for the first time, believed to be gaining the respect and recognition they longed for. While Steinweis cites the establishment of the Reich Culture Chamber as the first attempt to organize cultural professions and elevate their social and financial status in the spirit of neocorporatism, the Reich Music Chamber in particular went beyond these neocorporatist aims by embracing amateur groups as well in its choral and Hausmusik divisions.Footnote 60 The message that music played a special role in binding the Volksgemeinschaft (“people's community”) had been central to the youth movement, the burgeoning amateur movement, and the education reforms underway at least since the turn of the century. The Nazi government's ability not only to tap into this sentiment but also to dignify such movements by giving them official status, for example, as subdivisions of the music chamber can be seen not merely as a “nazification” or Gleichschaltung but rather as an acknowledgment of their service to the Volksgemeinschaft. Indeed, we should probably try to get beyond the traditional totalitarian interpretation of the term Gleichschaltung as “coordination” or even “nazification” and instead attempt to comprehend its connotation to contemporary Germans. To musicians frustrated for decades with regional inconsistencies and inaction in response to their social and economic demands, any such process of Gleichschaltung probably offered new hopes of standardization and economic security.
At the same time, whether studying an individual or a sector of the population, future endeavors need to adopt a model that takes into account the complex balance of coercion and compliance. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer proposed ways of rationalizing the basic ideas of totalitarianism with the mounting evidence of general compliance by developing a notion of “Herrschaft as social practice.” A paradigm employing this concept would accommodate Germans' compliance with Nazi extremism as a result of any or all of the following: true conviction, opportunism, improved sense of well-being, economic benefits, or fear inspired by the arbitrary victimization of those around them.Footnote 61 The music community may have had much to celebrate, yet may have also carefully considered the potential risks of going too far afield to challenge authority. It had witnessed early acts of terror and intimidation in the “revolutionary” period of the Third Reich and the quirky fate of unfortunate colleagues such as Strauss and Hindemith whose careers and reputations were severely compromised as a result of arbitrary political campaigns unleashed against them.
Closer examinations of the varying degrees of conformity will likely show that the greater the reputation of the artist (or organization), the lesser the need to profess the party line. Numerous case studies exist in the works by Kater, Prieberg, and Steinweis, and a preliminary survey of them reveals that celebrities or high-profile ensembles might initially be held accountable and even humiliated when their actions blatantly challenged radical policies (as in the case of Strauss's collaboration with Jewish author Stefan Zweig and Furtwängler's public defense of Hindemith), but for the most part the prestige they lent to the cultural reputation of the Third Reich earned them a surprising degree of freedom in pushing the boundaries of tolerance. On the other hand, those who professed their anti-Semitism and commitment to rooting out “degeneracy” in the hope of advancing their careers tended to be less well known or, in the case of Hans Pfitzner, trying to revive fading celebrity. The same goes for organizations: high-profile ensembles such as the Prussian State Opera and the Berlin Philharmonic could hold on to their Jewish members and defy race policies perhaps longer than others, while second-tier ones, such as the Mannheim Orchestra, donned their SA uniforms and criticized others for harboring Jews.Footnote 62 The more vulnerable amateur ensembles and scholarly societies similarly took the first steps to demonstrate their willingness to enforce anti-Semitic policies and to serve the Volksgemeinschaft, often in an effort to curry official favor and put themselves in a position to receive financial assistance.
To illustrate how such new approaches can be implemented, we can look both within and beyond music scholarship for studies that lay the groundwork for such explorations. The power of the Nazi party's appeal has been illustrated in the work of Robert Gellately, who has shown how Germans welcomed the promises of employment and government stability as antidotes to the chaos of the Weimar Republic, how any lingering doubts about the party were soon supplanted by fierce nationalism once the war began, and how radical measures, including those that led to genocide, could move forward in the guise of a state of emergency. Much care was taken throughout the years of the Third Reich to mold propaganda to appeal to German citizens, and the relentless promotion of the Volksgemeinschaft idea actually encouraged many to denounce others.Footnote 63 Studies on workers have also covered much ground in outlining both the attraction and the complexity of the Volksgemeinschaft ideal. Alf Lüdtke has shown how workers who otherwise might have felt no strong feelings of solidarity found a common cause as soldiers in eradicating “racial inferiors.”Footnote 64 Shelly Baranowski's study of the “Strength through Joy” branch of the DAF takes these issues one step further, revealing how the project to contrive a distinctly German solution to promoting solidarity among workers and break down class divisions met with some success but also led to unforeseen tensions.Footnote 65 The insights gained from these studies can be used to complement and expand upon existing preliminary investigations into both professional and amateur music groups in the Third Reich. In general, the music press in the early years of the regime was replete with discussions of how the current political conditions provided a long-awaited climate in which music, and especially German music, could finally thrive. My own work on the musicology profession provided an example how its central scholarly organization carried out its own internal Gleichschaltung by changing the names of the society and its journal, dismissing the journal's Jewish editor, adopting a charter based on the Führerprinzip, and offering itself to the Propaganda Ministry in its capacity to serve the Volksgemeinschaft.Footnote 66 Earlier studies on amateur music indicated that the draw of the Volksgemeinschaft principle and even its anti-Semitic undertones succeeded in attracting the musical branches of the youth movement, the umbrella organization of German choral societies, and even the workers' choral organizations, which voluntarily changed their names, employed politically acceptable conductors, and merged with the DAF.Footnote 67 Celia Applegate has more recently investigated the exploitation of private music-making (Hausmusik) toward constructing an illusion of a unified middle class, further suggesting that amateur musicians, flattered by the invitation to be incorporated into such an important-sounding organization as the newly created Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Hausmusik of the Reich Music Chamber, believed to have finally achieved recognition and status for their long-standing commitment to serving the Volksgemeinschaft.Footnote 68
How did Nazi ideology temporarily compromise German music?
The tendency to focus on how (rather than whether) Nazi ideology brought about the momentary decline of German music has led to a series of dead ends by isolating the Third Reich from the rest of German history, by allowing the subjectivity of musical judgment to get out of control, and by presuming that Nazi ideology was coherent and successfully implemented. The metahistorical problem of isolating the Nazi era from both the Weimar and post-war periods not only sanitizes the post-war era, as we have seen, but also romanticizes the Weimar period by overlooking trends that persisted for much of the first half of the century: conservative fears that foreign influences would degrade German musical integrity; mistrust toward popular culture; fear of the unbridled growth of recording and broadcasting technology; and the turn away from a romantic “individualist” aesthetic in favor of accessible, communal musical experiences. Recalling Rudolf Stephan's pronouncement that National Socialism “created nothing positive—it only destroyed,” we are also reminded that it has been relatively easy to undervalue the musical output of the Third Reich, for unlike literature or even visual arts, music often conveys no clear messages or extra-musical meanings, especially when it stands alone without any text, choreography, or other dramatic or visual cues, and leaves itself particularly vulnerable to political labeling and subjective qualitative judgments. While one can easily imagine in the abstract that an inferior brand of “Nazi music” thrived for twelve years, this same sleight of hand allowed Nazi propagandists to label the progressive experiments of Arnold Schoenberg and his school as “cultural Bolshevism,” while Soviet cultural critics attacked the very same music as “capitalist formalism.”
Furthermore, the very notion of a distinct Nazi “ideology” or “program” has to be largely abandoned, as a growing number of historians explain instead that the key to the Nazi party's success was its ability to appeal to as many sectors of the German population as possible, even when this meant making conflicting promises to win over, for example, both workers and big business simultaneously.Footnote 69 This inconsistency worked to the party's advantage in courting musicians by encouraging feelings of solidarity while tapping into simmering frustrations and fears. The party was already effective in fueling the animosities of the general population: toward forgers of the Versailles treaty, toward imagined enemies in their midst, and toward all who had in one way or another “victimized” Germany and eroded German identity and self-worth. For the music professions, these translated into animosities toward foreigners who proliferated their popular wares, toward wealthy outsiders who had bought musical treasures from impoverished German collections, and toward “Jewish” music critics who supposedly perverted musical taste away from “true German” music and monopolized jobs that could have been filled by the armies of overqualified and underemployed “true German” critics. This strategy even turned into a Janus-faced appeal by turning professional musicians against amateurs for competing unfairly with trained practitioners and educators, yet simultaneously luring amateur organizations over to the cause.
The most obvious remedy for countering the isolation of the Nazi episode lies in comparing its musical climate with that of Germany before, during, and after the Nazi years, as well as with contemporary musical life in other countries. Germany's musical history is full of examples of political exploitation that make Nazi tactics appear neither innovative nor particularly extreme. Weimar-era political demagogues of all stripes managed to play on the growth of both amateur musical activity and the notion of German musical superiority. Right-wing paramilitary groups were known to employ folk and classical repertoire to convey a message of political conservatism and völkisch nationalism, while left-wing politicians similarly used not only folk music but also the works of Beethoven, Bach, and Handel to promote democracy and solidarity among the German working class.Footnote 70 At the same time, many nations in the 1930s and 1940s, whether dictatorships or democracies, were dealing with the Depression, world wars, rising nationalist sentiment, racism, xenophobia, technological progress, and class and ethnic conflict. In this light, the move toward nationalism, lingering mistrust of technology, and the goal of embracing a wider “people's community” may prove to have a longer history in Germany and throughout the West.
Comparisons will also show that qualities normally ascribed to “Nazi music”—a rejection of experimentation, revival of national idioms, a move toward reaching the wider public—had deeper roots in the Weimar era and beyond, and could be observed in other countries as well (and not just Fascist Italy). In other areas of cultural history, distinct categories of “Nazi art” have been problematized with the observations of stylistic continuities from the Weimar years into the post-war era. Recent work has shown, for example, that so-called “Nazi” painting can be regarded as a continuation of the “New Objectivity,” and that the same styles in industrial design persisted from the 1920s to the 1960s.Footnote 71 And rather than assuming a qualitative decline after 1933, we need to reconsider how German music of the 1930s and 1940s was regarded internationally. Just as we should not ignore the international standing of other “Nazi” cultural achievements (the iconic representative of “Nazi art,” the painting of The Four Elements by the “master of pubic hair” Adolf Ziegler, won the Grand Prix for the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris, and Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia won the grand prize at the 1938 International Film Festival in Venice), we need to take a fresh look at the vast number of new compositions that have been relegated to the dustbin of “Nazi music.”
Considerable progress has been made in bringing the musical life of the Third Reich out of isolation by acknowledging the continuities from Weimar to the Third Reich to post-war Germany in musical practices and tastes.Footnote 72 To a lesser extent, expanding the comparative approach beyond Germany to observe aesthetic trends in other countries in the 1930s and 1940s has begun to reveal that many of the tendencies we have come to regard as “Nazi” or even fascist (in the numerous comparisons with Fascist Italy) may be far more universal and characteristic of the times. Some contributors to the 1981 panel “Music in the 1930s” (cited at the beginning of this essay) started to move in this direction, viewing the 1930s as an artistic low point not only in Germany but throughout Europe and the United States. Carl Dahlhaus referred to a compositional “regression” and a turn toward “populism” not only in the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia but also under democracies; József Ujfalussy noted an overall attraction to folk culture in eastern Europe as well as Germany;Footnote 73 Marius Flothuis characterized the musical climate of 1930s England, France, and Holland as a decade of artistic ennui (partly because many of the experiments of the 1920s had been “tamed” and normalized);Footnote 74 and Albrecht Riethmüller observed turns toward neoclassicism, ethical or religious subjects, accessibility, and monumentality in German as well as American composition.Footnote 75 The more recent work of Joan Evans on international music festivals has shown further that many composers of the 1930s tended more toward neoclassicism and that, following an initial period of isolation, composers in Nazi Germany soon found themselves very much in tune with the nationally tinged and harmonically conservative styles of their contemporaries in other countries.Footnote 76
How did the Nazis control German musical life?
This question is obviously problematic not only for relying too heavily on a totalitarian model, but also for taking at face value the antimodern, anti-American rhetoric of music propaganda without tracking the extent of its implementation. Although Jarausch and Geyer proposed that the nature of the ideology is perhaps not as important as the mechanism of propaganda that gave the impression of a consensus,Footnote 77 in the case of music, propaganda often came into direct contradiction with actual practice. The infamous “Degenerate Music” exhibit of 1938, modeled on the highly successful Degenerate Art show a year earlier, vilified jazz, “Jewish” operetta, music criticism, and individual conductors and composers, both Aryan and non-Aryan, who were singled out for having proliferated “degeneracy” through atonal composition and other musical means. While it attracted much attention, its attacks had little or no relevance for policy and practices before or after the exhibit took place. Operetta continued to thrive, the individuals under attack had all emigrated or died years before, the aversion to jazz by such leaders as Goebbels and Music Chamber president Peter Raabe had to yield to the idiom's popularity rather than risk subversion from Germany's growing number of jazz enthusiasts,Footnote 78 and even Herbert Gerigk, the zealous music consultant for Rosenberg's ideological watchdog organization, conceded that in the “right hands” (read: Aryan hands), atonal music could be highly expressive.Footnote 79 The gulf between ideology and practice was further widened by the problem that music, even more than the other arts, was far too decentralized to be brought under control, leaving censorship largely unenforceable. Nor was it ever clear that control of musical life was ever a high priority, given the limited personnel and resources assigned to music censorship and limited distribution of the few government-issued blacklists.Footnote 80
Instead, we need to turn this question on its head, asking how musical life carried on and perhaps even thrived under the Nazi system. This requires us to dismantle the dystopian image by considering all of the observations made thus far—on the special position of music, the optimism and cooperation of the music community, the ineffectiveness of music censorship—as well as entertaining the possibility of non-intervention in music policy on the part of Nazi leaders, at least on the national level, and compare these conditions with other chapters of German history. If we wish to single out the direct interference of policy-makers in Germany's day-to-day musical operations, for example, we must acknowledge not only Wilhelm II's notorious meddling in artistic decisions at the Royal Opera House but also the role of post-World War II ruling powers in shaping musical aesthetic policy. West German composers' turn to the esoteric realms of serialism and electronic music was not solely a voluntary rejection of the past but also an act of compliance with American military consultants operating German radio stations and funding modernist projects.Footnote 81 East German composers, for their part, received the clear message from Moscow that any forays into avant-garde “formalism” would not be tolerated in the new socialist state.Footnote 82
In assessing Nazi leaders' intervention (or lack thereof) in musical affairs, we can look to Hitler as a prime example. As a challenge to intentionalist arguments, Hitler's role came into question as early as the 1960s with suggestions that he functioned most effectively as a mere symbol of ideological consensus and authority (filling the perceived Weimar-era power vacuum), sometimes deliberately keeping himself at arm's length from actual policy-making such that an unpopular measure might prompt the response, “if only the Führer knew!”Footnote 83 If we accept Kershaw's more recent analysis of the phenomenon of “working towards the Führer,” which often involved sanctioning certain measures by attributing them to “the Führer's will,”Footnote 84 then earlier presumptions about Hitler's direct involvement in dictating music policy may have simply resulted from reading such invocations of his approval too literally. His most active engagement in music matters came from his personal obsession with Wagner and the Bayreuth festival, even to the point of offering specific recommendations for certain productions.Footnote 85 Beyond that, however, his most extensive public utterances on music (the above-mentioned speech at the 1938 Nuremberg Party Rally) actually included a declaration that interfering in the creative process of music went against the very principles of National Socialism.Footnote 86 Rosenberg and Goebbels, for their part, displayed relatively little knowledge of music and showed far less interest in engaging in the aesthetic debates surrounding it,Footnote 87 and even Goebbels's keynote speech for the opening of the Reich Music Days in 1938, where he outlined the “ten commandments” for German music, was strikingly vague.Footnote 88 Despite the highly publicized war on modern music and jazz, officials had neither the means nor the motivation to suppress much of the music they claimed to abhor. Of course this is not to say that a hands-off approach toward music was ubiquitous, and investigations of music operations such as the regional chapters of the Music Chamber are likely to reveal a broad spectrum of policies throughout the Reich.
Of all the new approaches proposed thus far, this last avenue offers the fewest examples of existing work. In my own research on the history of Berlin musical institutions, I have begun to explore how the status of musicians improved; how high-profile institutions such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the State Opera, and the Prussian State Orchestra evaded closure and enjoyed special privileges and artistic freedoms under the protective, aristocratic-style patronage of Goebbels and Goering; and how research and educational institutions received lavish subsidies and benefited from efforts to centralize musical operations in the Reich capital.Footnote 89 Jens Malte Fischer has similarly entered the lion's den—the Bayreuth Festival—to observe that in Nazi-era stagings of Wagner operas, artistic freedom continued to flourish, and luminaries of the Weimar years with modernist and even Marxist backgrounds launched productions that were just as controversial as the post-war experiments under Wieland Wagner.Footnote 90 But beyond assessing the artistic standing of such privileged, internationally known entities, a thorough investigation of the quality of music and musical life in the Third Reich requires an objective assessment of new music produced; a broad survey of the musical offerings in concert halls, opera houses, radio, sheet music, recordings, and amateur outlets; an evaluation of reception history (through box office receipts, reviews, recording sales, and public opinion polls conducted by the Sicherheitsdienst); and a consideration of how contemporary foreign observers regarded the state of music in the Third Reich.
* * *
If the dystopian image has outlived its usefulness, it should by no means be replaced by an image of a music utopia. As the above considerations have shown, if musical life did thrive, it was not without a price. That being said, perhaps the greatest challenge for cultural historians is to strike the right balance on all fronts. This is, of course, complicated by the fact that we cannot yet completely distance ourselves from the Stunde Null mentality or from the harsh admonitions of German exiles who set the agenda early on for ways to approach culture in the Third Reich. Even though German historiography may have moved beyond Hannah Arendt's analyses of the nature of totalitarianism, in cultural history the warnings of her fellow exiles still reverberate. In chorus with Arendt were the commentaries on German cultural life by the Mann family (Thomas's condemnation of fellow writers who stayed in Germany, and Heinrich's play Mephisto, a thinly disguised portrayal of theater director Gustav Gründgens's Faustian bargain with Goering), Adorno's declaration that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz, and Walter Benjamin's influential formulation of fascism fostering an aestheticization of politics. Thomas Mann and Adorno were also particularly influential in steering the course of music after the war. In addition to speculating on Wagner's deeper influence on Hitler (attributed to Mann, Adorno, and Emil Ludwig),Footnote 91 Mann problematized the entire history of Germans' relationship with music in his novel Dr. Faustus by suggesting how this alliance had turned unholy and led Germany to its downfall.Footnote 92 Adorno's advocacy on behalf of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg (and simultaneous rejection of Stravinsky and Strauss) contributed to setting the course for the Stunde Null musical ideology, and Adorno still prevails as the godfather of modern German musicology, as his writings continue to be reissued, translated, and taught in musicology curricula. Post-war composers acquiesced to both Adorno and Mann by striving to create music that was value-free, devoid of extra-musical meaning, neutral, rational, and scientifically grounded. They were, in effect, trying to establish a new and healthier relationship between Germans and their music. This ruse has recently been abandoned, however, as reunified Germany's identity no longer tries to free itself from the inextricable ties to its musical past. In recent years composers such as Hans Werner Henze have come full circle to acknowledge this relationship, abandoning the earlier pursuit of a value-free aesthetic and instead openly embracing the musical links to Beethoven, Wagner, and others in newer works.Footnote 93
The shocking revelations of the Holocaust understandably had a numbing effect on post-war cultural historians, not only because of the sheer numbers killed or of the degrees of cruelty inflicted, but also because of the unnerving paradoxes that challenged so many basic assumptions about Western culture: that the Germans, a people who had enriched the western world with their literature, science, philosophy, and music, could commit unimaginable atrocities, and that, despite these barbarous conditions, cultural life could continue to operate, even flourish. It was far easier to presume that the arts suffered at the hands of the Nazi dictatorship than to analyze the paradoxical implication that they might have actually benefited in some cases from the new order. When the totalitarian model received renewed attention after the fall of communism as a useful starting point for comparing the Nazi and Soviet-bloc systems,Footnote 94 music scholars were also there to juxtapose the two,Footnote 95 even though the special qualities of music and its prominence in German culture arguably made it that much more resistant to forces that would compromise its standing and its independence. The paradox of German culture thriving amidst the hatred and suspicion of the Nazi years, difficult as it is to comprehend, is nevertheless all the more important to analyze, because it holds a key to understanding how societies we regard as advanced and cultivated can so readily succumb to fear and xenophobia and continue to feel justified in their courses of action.
