Pamela M. Potter

Musicology under Hitler: New Sources in Context

Recognizing musicology9s demonstrated potential to contribute to its ideological aims, the Nazi government took immediate steps to centralize music scholarship and, along with the SS, to subsidize relevant research projects. Alfred Rosenberg9s ideological watchdog organization recruited musicologists for a variety of tasks, including the plundering of musical treasures in occupied territories and the assessment of the receptivity of occupied populations to Germany9s eventual takeover of cultural life. Meanwhile, many scholars contributed to the press with music historical justifications for all of Germany9s current military and diplomatic actions. Born in an era preoccupied with the creation of the German nation-state, musicology had embraced a Germanocentric focus, dating back to Forkel, that the Nazi propaganda machine fully exploited. This nationalism also infiltrated American musicology with the arrival of German emigre scholars.

Dismantling a Dystopia: On the Historiography of Music in the Third Reich

In 1981, the Gesellschaft fur 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

The Arts in Nazi Germany: A Silent Debate

Joan Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 182 pp.,

Wagner and the Third Reich: myths and realities

24.95 (pb), ISBN 1845202015. Richard Etlin, ed., Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 384 pp.,

Die Lage der jüdischen Musikwissenschaftler an den Universitäten der Weimarer Zeit

29.00 (pb), ISBN 0226220877. Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 276 pp.,

The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right by Paul B. Jaskot (review)

25.95 (pb), ISBN 0804743274. Peter Paret, An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 191 pp., ?25.00 (hb), ISBN 052182138X. Frederick Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson, 2002), 488 pp., X25-00 (hb), ISBN 0091793947.

Music and German national identity

The subject of music in Nazi Germany invariably elicits the name Wagner, whether as a reference to Hitlers legendary adulation of the composer, to the notorious admiration for Hitler on the part of the composers (posthumous) daughter-in-law and Bayreuth festival director, Winifred Wagner, to the presumed prominence of Wagners music in the Third Reich, or to Wagners anti-Semitism as a harbinger of the extermination of European Jewry. Yet the multiple roles of “Wagner” – the man, the family, the works, and the cultural-ideological legacy – in the Third Reich cannot be understood without peeling away several layers of myth. While some of these myths arose in Hitlers Germany, most were inspired by German expatriates and developed from postwar debates resulting from the desperate attempts to explain how a highly cultured people could carry out such atrocities. scholars have only recently begun to sort the myth from the reality in assessing the functions of Wagner and Bayreuth in Nazi culture, politics, and musical life. The following exploration will examine the many roles of the phenomenon of “Wagner” in the Nazi state, considering Nazi-era realities as well as their postwar historical interpretations and, sometimes, distortions.

Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler`s Reich

Will man den Beginn des Exodus deutscher Musikwissenschaftler fixieren, so last sich zunachst behaupten, das ihre Vertreibung durch die Nationalsozialisten offiziell und offensichtlich im April 1933 begann, als die deutschen Universitaten und ihre Fakultaten gleichgeschaltet wurden. Die Regierung fuhrte das »Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums« ein, durch das alle, die bestimmte Kriterien nicht erfullen konnten, sofort in den Ruhestand versetzt wurden. Die Kriterien waren u.a. »die vorgeschriebene oder ubliche Vorbildung oder sonstige Eignung«, also politische Zuverlassigkeit und vor allem die arische Abstammung.

What Is “Nazi Music”?

er lediglich einzelne Bestandteile und gebe keine Impulse (vgl. 1223f.), so dass Breuer resümierend von einer “Instrumentalisierung” (1224) spricht. Nach dieser sorgsamen Revision dürfte der ad nauseam erhobene Vorwurf, George habe das “Dritte Reich” vorbereitet bzw. maßgeblich mitgeprägt, nicht mehr zu halten sein. Zwar weist allein die Existenz eines Handbuchs auf die Bedeutung eines Autors hin, im vorliegenden Falle bestätigen dies zudem Umfang und Qualität des Inhalts aufs Trefflichste. Sei es schöner Zufall oder planmäßige Anlage: Das dreibändige opus magnum endet mit der Seitenzahl 1868, dem Geburtsjahr Georges. Zu Recht signalisieren die Herausgeber den Anspruch, der künftigen George-Forschung eine Grundlage geschaffen zu haben, wie sie solider und umfassender kaum denkbar ist.