What Is Nazi Music

What Is "Nazi Music"?
Author(s): Pamela M. Potter

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 428-455
Published by: Oxford University Press
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The Twentieth Century and Beyond and Institutions, Technology,
and Economics
What Is "Nazi Music"?
Pamela M. Potter
Whenever the words "Nazi" and "music" are uttered in the same breath,
they are likely to conjure up images of goose-stepping troops stomping to
military marches, fight songs sung to torch-lit processions, Hitler kissing
the hand of Winifred Wagner, or swastika-decked concert halls featuring
the neo-Romantic kitsch of forgotten composers. One may also know
about the propaganda campaigns touting the virtues of folksong and the
great German masters while vilifying jazz, Jews, and atonality, most bla-
tantly displayed in the notorious Degenerate Music exhibit of 1938. These
timeless images, emblazoned on the book jackets and CD liner notes of
nearly every encounter with music in the Third Reich, have left the indel-
ible impression that the National Socialist regime tolerated its own offi-
cially sanctioned Nazi music and aggressively suppressed everything else.
In a recent study on art in the Third Reich, historian Joan
Clinefelter asserted that the term "Nazi art" was rarely used during the
Hitler years; rather, artists, critics, and scholars strove to identify and
privilege "German" art.1 Surprising as it may seem, the same was true of
music. Rather than invoking "Nazi music" or any term remotely approxi-
mating it, policymakers, composers, and musicians all shared in the mis-
sion to cultivate "German music." As Bernd Sponheuer has shown,
"what the National Socialists were interested in-as in their music policy
in general-was not the development of their original concepts ...
[Hans Joachim Moser's 1938 summation about the nature of German
music] contains no single idea that one could designate specifically as
National Socialist."2 Nazi music is, instead, an amorphous concept that
since the end of World War II has hovered over our general understand-
ing of the history of German music in the twentieth century. It implies
certain assumptions about who created music in the Third Reich, the
conditions under which it was produced, and the quality of that music.
Put simply, these assumptions hold that 1) a group of Nazi composers
and musicians flourished in the Third Reich; 2) they worked under the
repressive conditions of the Nazi dictatorship; and 3) the musical
doi: 10.1093/musqtl/gdi019 88:428-455

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What Is "Nazi Music"? 429
products of the Third Reich, which upheld the tenets of Nazi ideology,
were artistically inferior.
At the core of the concept of Nazi music is the pervasive inclination
to isolate the Nazi phenomenon from all other episodes in German his-
tory. If one designates the Weimar Republic as the "golden twenties" on
one end and the year 1945 as the zero hour on the other, the Nazi period
can easily be cordoned off as a historical anomaly. This tendency is under-
standable, too, for it sidesteps a particularly vexing paradox of German
cultural history. At the risk of stating the obvious, we cannot escape the
general consensus that the Third Reich was perhaps the greatest tragedy
of the twentieth century, but not only because of the sheer numbers killed
or the degrees of cruelty inflicted, rather also because of the unnerving
paradox that the German bearers of culture-a people who had enriched
the Western world with their literature, science, philosophy, and music-
could be led to commit such barbarous acts.
Yet cultural life-and musical life perhaps above all-continued to
operate, even to flourish, in some sectors. Adherence to the concept of
Nazi music has unfortunately obscured that perspective and, in the
process, created gaps in our understanding by virtually excising an entire
chapter of German music history. A scan of the textbooks most widely
used in twentieth-century survey courses gives the impression that
German music inaugurated the century with the Second Viennese School,
proceeded to the "New Objectivity" experiments of the 1920s, and then
moved into exile with the victims of National Socialism. The canon thus
privileges the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern,
Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, and Ernst Krenek (with Carl Orff as the lone
representative of those who stayed in Germany, and the dodecaphonist
Josef Matthias Hauer as the lone Austrian),3 but otherwise ignores any
music that might have been produced within Germany's borders between
1933 and 1945. The works of successful composers in the Third Reich
have, for better or worse, missed out on the chance to be considered for
inclusion in the canon, and have for the most part fallen into oblivion.4
In what follows, I will examine how assumptions about Nazi music con-
tinue to rest on outmoded ways of thinking about the Third Reich that date
back as far as 1945, with the inauguration of the ill-fated Allied program of
denazification and the early postwar zero-hour mentality. In the western
zones of occupation, later the Federal Republic of Germany (discussions of
music and musicians in Nazi Germany were virtually off-limits for much of
the forty-year existence of the German Democratic Republic), any full con-
frontations with the Nazi past had to wait until the 1970s, by which time
general historians had questioned several assumptions that music historians
nevertheless embraced. As a result, to this day discussions of music in Nazi
430 The Musical Quarterly
Germany often gravitate toward fulfilling the denazification-inspired task of

determining the guilt or innocence of individual musicians and composers,
and answering zero-hour-inspired questions about the degrees to which the
Nazis, and even Adolf Hitler himself, acted to suppress certain types of music
and promote others. Liberating ourselves from the concept of Nazi music has
the potential to bring German culture out of this period out of isolation, lead-
ing to a more nuanced understanding of music of the 1930s and 1940s and
the history of musical modernism within and beyond Germany. The seeming
oxymoron of "Nazi culture" (and music's central role in it), difficult as it may
be to comprehend, is all the more important to deconstruct and analyze
because it holds keys to understanding how societies we regard as advanced
and educated can so readily succumb to fear and xenophobia.
The Legacy of Denazification
One of the central achievements of the new musicology has been to throw a
critical light on the nineteenth-century cult of genius that privileged a com-
poser-centered methodology. The concept of Nazi music, however, still rests
very much e-. a composer-centered foundation, and attempts to write the
history of music in the Third Reich have been focused largely on reconstruct-
ing the political roles of individuals and determining their guilt or innocence.
These investigations have, in a sense, carried on the unfinished business of
the seriously flawed Allied programs of denazification and re-education that
ended abruptly and inconclusively in 1948. These programs differed from any
other war settlement, going beyond demilitarization, the payment of repara-
tions, and even punishment for war crimes. The Allies assumed the ambi-
tious goal of eradicating all traces of Nazism, rooting out the "fundamental
conditions of German life which have made her a recurring menace to the
peace of the world."5 Following mass arrests and the immediate release of the
least suspect, all Germans over the age of eighteen were required to fill out
questionnaires to determine the degree of their involvement in the Nazi
party and other organizations and activities. Initially the Allies used this
information to draw up "black-gray-white lists" in 1945. In the early months
of 1946, the process was turned over to German tribunals (Spruchkammem),
which added the slightly more refined categories of major offenders, offend-
ers, lesser offenders, followers, and guiltless.6 Punishments could include
imprisonment, forced labor, loss of employment, loss of property, and fines.7
In the music world, those who presumably aided the Nazi government
came under especially close scrutiny at first, but were given far more
leeway once jurisdiction was transferred to the Spruchkammem and the
completion of the denazification process was hastened. Under the American
occupation, for example, German musicians and composers initially were

not only investigated for membership in the National Socialist German
Workers Party or for having allowed themselves to be a "tool in the hands
of the Nazis," but were also screened for nationalist leanings, authoritarian
personality traits (particularly in the case of conductors), and thinking "of
German Kultur as the only superior product of human mentality."8 A large
number of prominent musical figures, however, managed to glide through
the denazification process because the occupying forces, despite their
mistrust of the German cultural elite, harbored a deeply ingrained respect
for German music and placed a high priority on getting Germany's musical
life back on its feet, often at a breakneck pace.9 In early 1948, the Soviets
announced that denazification was complete in their zone and, with its
transformation into the German Democratic Republic in 1949, was free of
Nazis. Under pressure to keep up, the western zones brought their denazi-
fication to an abrupt end. The new Federal Republic of Germany got
swept up in the rapid reconstruction known as the "economic miracle," and,
with the help of public and private support, performance venues, conser-
vatories, music publishing houses, and recording companies came to rival
international competitors and worked to revive tourism, educational
exchange programs, export (of printed music, recordings, instruments,
teaching methods), and Germany's international cultural reputation. In
the process, many who were active and even successful in Nazi musical life
continued their careers in both German states, contributing to and bene-
fiting from the huge growth of postwar music industries. From the 1950s
on, it was not difficult for stars such as Herbert von Karajan, Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf, and Carl Orff to deny their Nazi affiliations, because the
world wanted to believe that musicians inhabited the elevated realm of
art and would never descend into the underworld of politics.
Still, the experience of denazification led both the judges and the
judged to form an exaggerated sense of what it meant to be a Nazi. Put in
the position of having to explain all behavior from 1933 to 1945, many
Germans under investigation professed their opposition to the Nazi
regime by transforming the smallest gestures of dissent into heroic feats of
resistance and by exaggerating the degree of terror brought upon them,
explaining every act of complicity as a matter of survival. When questioned,
they often denied many of their actions of the preceding twelve years,
inflated minor hardships or conflicts into evidence of their persecution, or
relied on even casual (and sometimes fabricated) associations with Jews as
evidence of opposition. The stark polarity of Nazi versus non-Nazi was
softened somewhat by the consideration of such mitigating factors as an
individual's nationalism, conservatism, retreat into "inner emigration,"'10
"apolitical" nature, purely artistic priorities, or veiled resistance, but these
additional classifications hardly ventured beyond the five categories of

guilt established by the Spruchkammem in 1946 and came no closer to
answering the nagging question of what it really meant to be a Nazi. Did
one earn the designation of Nazi by joining the National Socialist Party?
Richard Strauss's and Hans Pfitzner's detractors would say no, since neither
ever joined the party, but many believe they should nonetheless be vilified
as Nazis.11 Conversely, party membership alone would brand the musicologist
Kurt Huber as a Nazi, even though he was executed for his participation
in the White Rose student resistance movement after drafting and distrib-
uting pamphlets urging German citizens to defy the Nazi leadership.12
To add to the confusion, most biographies of prominent musical
figures written thereafter, both scholarly and nonscholarly, glossed over
the Nazi years entirely. Reference works such as Die Musik in Geschichte
und Gegenwart and even the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians skipped over the Nazi-era activities of these individuals
entirely." The political involvement of the most prominent, such as Strauss
and the famed Berlin conductor Wilhelm Furtwaingler, could hardly escape
notice (Furtwmingler's denazification was an international cause cdlbre and
has even carried over into popular culture with the stage play-turned-film
about his trial, Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides).14 Most of the others,
however, quietly evaded scrutiny, and anyone hoping to uncover their
secrets met with obstacles from archivists, families, and the individuals
themselves.15 Any evidence hinting at the Nazi-era successes of existing
musical institutions, industries, or individuals would not only pique the ire
of those implicated, but would also potentially jeopardize the international
appeal of what the "new" Germany could offer to the music world.
This secrecy may have served the greater aims of rebuilding Germany's
musical reputation, but it made it particularly difficult to get at the bare facts
about musical activity in the Nazi years, and the subject of music and musi-
cians in the Third Reich remained explicitly off-limits for an entire genera-
tion of music scholars in Germany.16 Professors admonished their students
not to investigate this dark period of history, insisting that those who had not
experienced the times firsthand lacked the necessary qualifications.17 A few
notable attempts to break the silence came out in the early 1980s,18 but grad-
ually the focus shifted to an intense investigation of the victims of National
Socialism, broadly defined to include the "good Germans" (those who left
Nazi Germany) alongside persecuted Jews, Communists, and other targeted
groups. This new avenue of research launched large and well-organized initi-
atives bearing such names as Exilforschung (Exile Research), Entartete Musik
(Degenerate Music), and Verdringte Musik (Suppressed Music), and pro-
duced dozens of publications, exhibitions, and recordings. The purpose of
these initiatives was not only to expose the cruelties and injustices meted out
to these individuals but, in the case of composers, also to rediscover and

reanimate their silenced musical works. There was a tacit understanding that
all composers who left Nazi Germany, for any reason, were morally upstand-
ing and therefore worthy of having their works taken seriously, while all
composers who remained were morally suspect and therefore artistically
unworthy of attention, as their music most certainly represented Nazi kitsch
at best and racist or nationalist propaganda at worst.
Signs of the imminent breakdown of these rigid classifications were
on the horizon, however, as early as 1980. In the enigmatic case of emigre
composer Paul Hindemith, for example, Claudia Maurer Zenck brought
evidence to light about his close association 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 momen-
tary rise to prominence as one of the leading composers of Nazi Germany.
In the face of attacks from Nazi extremists, Hindemith used his Nazi
connections, invited Hitler to attend one of his composition classes, and
even defended his work by contrasting it with the "sonic orgies" of 6migr s
Weill, Krenek, and Schoenberg.19 Further research on the political
engagement of Hindemith and others continued to problematize the
traditional black-and-white categories of victim and perpetrator, leading
to the conclusion that a musician's fate depended on a certain degree of
talent, fortuitous political connections, and sheer luck.20
Such revelations, however, only intensified debates by provoking the
advocates of traditional victims to defend their subjects even more vehe-
mently, rather than encouraging musicologists to revisit and refine the cate-
gories of guilt and innocence. As recently as 1999, Michael Kater and
Albrecht Riethmiiller organized a conference in Toronto on music in the
Third Reich "in order to complete unfinished business" after the Carl Orff
Center in Munich apparently refused to publish the proceedings of a confer-
ence in which Kater revealed Orff's compromising behavior in the 1930s
and 1940s.21 The Orff Center, one can assume, was deeply invested in the
study of the composer's life and works and, given the climate that had pre-
vailed 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. Even at Kater and Riethmiiller's conference
the debates persisted, for example, as the director of the Hindemith Insti-
tute in Frankfurt dismissed "incriminating" findings about Hindemith and
scrutinized the reception history of Mathis der Maler in an effort to demon-
strate the work's inherently "antifascist" nature.22 The author was under-
standably seeking to protect Hindemith from moral suspicion, aware that
any doubt cast on the composer's victimhood might hurl him into the same
oblivion to which the majority of Nazi composers have been condemned.
The Musical Zero Hour
The almost seamless transition from the Nazi period to the postwar years
of musical industries, operations, and individual careers was also facili-
tated by the semi-official position taken by the music community, empha-
sizing the differences between the recent past and the immediate future
and in effect constructing a musical zero hour. Although the term "zero
hour" (Stunde Null) has murky origins that have been traced to the various
calls to arms to defeat Hitler (in books by Richard Freund [1937] and
Erika Mann [1940], and a 1944 appeal by exiled leftist Karl Becker) as well
as to a 1948 Rossellini film (Germania, anno zero),23 the concept gained
most of its currency among a younger group of cultural figures who wished
to distance themselves from those who had lived through the Nazi years,
prompting the publicist Hans Richter to observe in 1946 that "rarely in
the history of any country ... has such a spiritual gap between two gener-
ations opened up as now in Germany."24 As the details of the Nazi years
descended into a confusion of repressed memories, the end of World War
II came to represent a perceptible caesura that separated the bleak past
from the promising future. Left in a state of aimlessness, this generation
found itself unable to articulate what went wrong in those twelve infamous
years, directing its energies instead to building a new future in what has
been described as "a vicious circle of idealism and self-denial."25
In the music world of postwar Germany, tacit acceptance of a musi-
cal zero hour allowed for portraying Nazi-era musical life as an anti-model
against which all musical activity of the postwar period could be contrasted.
This was reinforced by the Allied military officers, who had reported in
1945 that Hitler "succeeded in transforming the lush field of musical
creativity into a barren waste," that Germany's most talented musicians
had gone abroad, and that composers in the Third Reich had produced
only works deemed "psychologically effective to the Nazi cause."26 An
image of a highly regimented, totalitarian society emerged in which Nazi
leaders, guided by their ideology, had taken the trouble to spell out the
criteria for unacceptable music and made sure these regulations were
enforced. Accordingly, Nazi music policy allegedly consisted of pervasive
censorship, the harnessing of all musical activity and musical creation for
political purposes, and above all a vehement, ideology-driven campaign to
eradicate modern music. And more often than not, Hitler himself was
cited as the final arbiter of musical policy, whether or not evidence could
trace a paper trail leading to his desk. Despite the amnesia upon which it
was based,27 this Hitler-centered, musically conservative, tightly con-
trolled totalitarianism served as a useful contrast to the musical diversity
and artistic freedoms to be cultivated and enjoyed in the new West
German democracy.28 Musicians, composers, critics, and policymakers

could construct an identity that was free of associations with the recent
past and distance themselves from an allegedly consistent Nazi music
policy. By painting the bleakest picture possible of this history, one could
justify virtually any artistic direction as new and untainted, even if it
continued a trend that may have existed during the Third Reich.
When the silence imposed by the musicology establishment was
finally broken, scholars had little to fall back on beyond these assumptions
about the relentlessness of the totalitarian Nazi regime. The first group to
defy the establishment consisted largely of the "68ers," those whose parents
were adults during the Third Reich and who became involved in the
student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s that aimed to imple-
ment educational reforms and put an end to the silence surrounding the
Third Reich.29 Attracted to the teachings of Theodor Adorno, students of
musicology staged a rebellion against the older generation and demanded
more openness to Marxist approaches and a confrontation with the Nazi
past. In 1970 a heated debate broke out at the Bonn meeting of the
Gesellschaft fiir Musikforschung over the political responsibility of musi-
cologist Heinrich Besseler, and in 1974 students organized a Forum of
Democratic Musicology concurrent with the annual meeting of the
Gesellschaft, addressing several topics dealing with the Nazi years and
later pursuing investigations of the role of Bayreuth in the Third Reich,
the music of the youth movement, and exiled composers.30 It was not
until 1981, when some of these students held faculty positions of their
own, that the Gesellschaft organized a session at its annual conference
that touched on the topic, albeit with the somewhat evasive rubric of
Music of the 1930s, and not limited to Germany.31
The tone of the gathering still resonated with zero-hour senti-
ments. Rudolf Stephan concluded his opening remarks with the follow-
ing admonition:
Whoever concerns himself with the music and the musical life of the
Third Reich must ask himself: did National Socialism make any contri-
bution 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.32
By this time, however, historians had thoroughly questioned and largely

discredited the bleak, two-dimensional portrayal of Nazi society embodied
in the historical interpretation of Nazi Germany as a totalitarian state.

This totalitarian concept, which had caught on immediately after the
war through the influential writings of Hannah Arendt, rested 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.33 This interpretation gained even more currency
as the Cold War intensified, with adherents using it as a basis for high-
lighting similarities between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It did
not take long, however, for historians to question the integrity of the
model, especially when New Left scholars gravitated toward Marxist
interpretations equating Nazism with fascism and linking them
inextricably with capitalism.34
Similarly, the exaggeration of Hitler's role and of the existence of a
coherent and consistent ideology-necessary counterparts to upholding
the totalitarian concept-came under fire as early as the 1960s. West
German historians (most notably Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen)
challenged this aspect of what came to be known as the "intentionalist"
view by demonstrating that, rather than exerting his will in all areas of
German society, Hitler was one of many players in a chaotic struggle for
power. His personal obsessions notwithstanding, Hitler functioned most
effectively as a symbol of central authority and ideological consensus,
remedying both the perceived power vacuum created by the abdication of
Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 and the chaos of Weimar-era political disunity.
One could even argue that Hitler deliberately kept himself at arm's length
from actual policymaking in order to uphold his popular appeal and deflect
any public dissatisfaction with such measures toward those government
and party agencies issuing them, prompting such expressions of disap-
proval as "if only the Fiihrer knew!"35 At the same time, a growing number
of historians pointed to the difficulty of pinpointing a distinct Nazi ideol-
ogy or program, and explained that the key to the Nazis' success was their
ability to appeal to as many sectors of the German population as possible,
even when this meant making conflicting promises to win over, for exam-
ple, both workers and big business simultaneously. Even basic introduc-
tory textbooks on modern German history reject the notion of a central
ideology. One widely used survey concludes that "the Nazis propagated,
not a coherent doctrine or body of systematically interrelated ideas, but
rather a vaguer worldview made up of a number of prejudices with varied
appeals to different audiences which could scarcely be dignified with the
term 'ideology'."36
Despite these ongoing debates, even some recent studies on the
music of the Third Reich cling to these well-worn assumptions. The entry
on Germany in the latest edition of The New Grove Dictionary asserts that
"those composers who did not participate in the obligatory composition of

marches, choruses and songs and cantatas propounding Nazi ideology,
were either forced into isolation ... or withdrew into a kind of internal
exile."37 In the 2003 essay collection Music and Nazism (the conference
report for Kater and Riethmiiller's 1999 symposium), Reinhold Brinkmann,
a pioneer in breaking the silence on the Third Reich, similarly invokes the
totalitarian concept with the presumption of "composers being forced to
create monumental compositions that would embody the National Socialist
agenda."38 In another recent work, Frederic Spotts's otherwise illuminat-
ing revelations about Hitler (such as his fairly sophisticated understanding
of music and architecture and surprisingly open-minded attitude toward
current artistic trends) relies on the standard model of totalitarian repres-
sion in which, given Germany's incomparable wealth of musical outlets,
"the scope for political intervention was vast."39
Recent studies also reiterate Hitler's central role in dictating music
policy and taste, even while wrestling awkwardly with their own assump-
tions. Spotts, for example, claims that it was remarkably easy for Hitler to
"impose his policies" but on the very next page demonstrates how Hitler's
refusal to micromanage left music policies in a chaotic state. He then
concludes that Hitler's attitudes toward music were quite liberal after all,
and that the dictator showed no desire to lay down aesthetic restrictions
on composers.40 Brinkmann combs through Mein Kampf and Hitler's early
speeches to demonstrate how "symphonic genres could so easily be used
for the purpose of ideology," nevertheless offering the caveat that Mein
Kampf is full of inconsistencies.41 He has unfortunately overlooked what
may be Hitler's most explicit public statement on the role of the symphony-
a speech at the 1938 Nuremberg Party Rally-where the Fiihrer not only
deems music incapable of expressing political values, but also specifies
that the symphony was particularly unsuited for such demands.42 In a
recent essay collection dedicated to culture and media in the Third Reich,
the only contribution on music, by Albrecht Diimling, similarly asserts
Hitler's imposition of his musical taste on the German public, but cites
evidence that is at most flimsy, if not completely irrelevant:
Hitler grounded Nazi policy on music according to his own predilections.

Whatever impressed him . . should also impress the entire German
population ... Hitler also claimed to be an opera and concert fuihrer. His
asceticism was well known. Hitler abhorred alcohol, cigarettes, and all
corporeal pleasures: he was a vegetarian and a bachelor. This abstinence
allowed him to dedicate himself all the more exclusively to national con-
cerns. There was something monklike about him, a similarity to Wagner's
figures of Lohengrin and Parsifal in the music dramas of those names.43
These recent attempts to perpetuate the image of a tightly run musi-

cal regime with Hitler at the helm come into direct conflict not only with
the historical debates cited above, but also with evidence that has been
mounting in numerous other studies of music in the Third Reich since the
early 1990s. The notion of a strict totalitarian grip on musical life began to
erode in an important study of the Reich Chamber of Culture by historian
Alan Steinweis, showing how music, even more than the other arts, was
far too decentralized and extensive to be brought under widespread gov-
ernment or party control. Music censorship policy in Nazi Germany was
amorphous at best, and largely unenforceable given the limited personnel
and resources assigned to it. The few government-issued blacklists had a
limited distribution and led to no organized measures to ensure that they
were honored.44 Even in the case of jazz, which Nazi leaders such as
Joseph Goebbels and Music Chamber president Peter Raabe particularly
reviled, Kater and others have shown that any attempt to limit access to
the music met with such strong public resistance that the government
retreated from its anti-jazz measures rather than risk evoking widespread
discontent among Germany's growing number of jazz enthusiasts.45
Michael Walter challenged the totalitarianism concept further in his 1995
study on opera and pointed to the inability during the twelve years of the
Third Reich to arrive at any consistent music policy.46
The application of the totalitarian concept to understanding musical
life in the Third Reich receives even more blows to its credibility in other
essays in the Music and Nazism volume, as Celia Applegate shows that
politics were not as central to daily existence as one assumes, nor was
music all that central to political agendas.47 Kim Kowalke offers several
instances in which music publishers successfully evaded government
controls, and Stephen McClatchie provides a stunning insight into the
attitudes toward censorship with the following quote by Goebbels from
November 1943: "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."48 With regard to ideology,
Guido Heldt concludes that the term has been overused and misconstrued,
despite its attractiveness as a concept, and that attempts to grasp it have
led only to dead ends. He states that "we might fare better if we do not
look for a consistent and coherent construction of 'Nazi ideology,' but
instead for bits and pieces, an untidy array of different ideologemes and
their translation into political workability, rooted in decades of German
politics and culture before 1933, fervently believed by some and cynically
used by others, contested among factions in the Nazi apparatus, and
flexibly adapted to suit the conditions of different cultural fields."49 More

and more evidence suggests that Nazi leaders 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.50
Finally, the idea that Hitler micromanaged musical policy has been
the least stable assumption. There is little evidence, first of all, that many
Germans read Mein Kampf, and in his longest and most public excursus on
music, the speech at the 1938 Nuremberg Party Rally, Hitler even went so
far as to declare that "it would be terrible if National Socialism on the one
hand were to dominate the spirit of the time and cause the dilution of our
musical creative strength, [and] on the other hand, by setting false goals,
were to contribute to allowing or even leading music in the wrong direc-
tion, [a situation] which is just as bad as the general confusion we have
left behind."51 In the Music and Nazism volume, Hans Vaget asserts that
the legendary connections between Wagner and Hitler are elusive at
best,52 and Riethmiiller's analysis of Strauss's fall from grace shows how
inflated assumptions about Hitler's intervention in musical matters have
led to exaggerations of the relevance of Hitler's apparent snub. During his
collaboration with the Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig, Strauss wrote an
angry letter criticizing the regime that was intercepted by the Gestapo. He
followed up by writing an ingratiating apology to Hitler that was never
answered. Rather than reading too much into Hitler's silence, Riethmiiller
asks whether one should have even expected the Fiihrer to pay attention
to the entreaties of a musical subordinate, even such a prominent figure as
Strauss, let alone the minutiae of musical aesthetics.53
Nazi Music?
We turn now to the basic assumption about Nazi music: that most, if not
all, musical products of the Third Reich upheld the tenets of a central
ideology and were artistically inferior. Investigations into the nature and
substance of Nazi music have taken various approaches that include
examining style and aesthetics and, above all, defining Nazi music by what
it was not. Musicologists have looked first to opera, undoubtedly because
it held the most promise for offering irrefutable political content at least in
the texts, if not in the music. The earliest attempts included the present-
ations by Carl Dahlhaus and Hans-Giinter Klein at the 1981 meeting of
the Gesellschaft fiir Musikforschung, neither of which yielded conclusive
results.54 And Klein's expanded analysis, which appeared a few years later,
demonstrated little progress: he could conclude only that the criteria for
acceptable opera were opaque, that the official call for Volkstumlichkeit in
opera composition was never clearly outlined, and that any attempt to
find a discrete Nazi opera theory revealed only inconsistencies.55 In one of
the last of such attempts to mine opera for potential clues, a 1996 essay
entitled "Toward an Aesthetic of Fascist Opera," Erik Levi scrutinized
libretti as well as musical style but similarly failed to find any hard evidence
of a Nazi musical aesthetic: there were no operas with overt Nazi symbol-
ism or subject matter, censorship of texts was never enforced, a revival of
Volksoper and neo-Wagnerian works was encouraged but never gained
public acceptance, and the presence of musical modernism-ranging from
percussive ostinati and dissonance to outright atonality-reflected "the
regime's uncertainty with regard to musical aesthetics."56 In the mean-
time, the more extensive study by Walter had revealed the stark inconsis-
tencies 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 noticeably
reminiscent of works by Schoenberg, Krenek, and Weill.57
As stylistic and textual analyses of opera seemed to offer more prob-
lems than solutions, those in search of Nazi music have recently sought
out new avenues, but they have not given up the search for a discrete Nazi
musical ideology or the central role of Hitler and other Nazi leaders in
steering it. Under the heading "Hitler and the Romantic Revival,"
Diimling makes inferences that lead one to think that Nazi music was
predominantly Romantic in style. Citing contemporary writings that
reiterated the Romantic notions of music as an expression of the soul
and singling out passages from Hitler's 1938 speech calling on composers
to rely on their "musical temperament" and listen to their hearts, he refers
offhandedly to "the Romanticism that acquired new prominence in the
musical life of the Nazi era."58 Other recent inquiries similarly branch out
beyond the music itself into philosophy and rhetoric to single out-if not
Nazi music, per se-a unique Nazi musical ideology or aesthetic. In a 1999
collection of essays entitled Die dunkle Last, we find contributions that
contrast the philosophical tracts of Adorno and Rosenberg (without nec-
essarily drawing on their writings about music), that scrutinize antiration-
alist thinking for the roots of Nazi music aesthetics (once again focusing
on non-music-related writings, except for those of Pfitzner), and that
tease out "specific fascist syntax" in the writings of the church composer
Hugo Distler.59 We also find the scrutiny of such obscure musical artifacts
as the harmonica for evidence of its ideological significance.60
The majority of inquiries into the nature of Nazi music, however,
draw their parameters from assumptions about what Nazi music was not,
starting with the assumption that Nazi music was the antithesis of
modernism. Falling under the spell of a musical zero hour, music critics
and composers in the western zones of occupation and, later, the Federal
Republic subscribed to the idea that since music in the Third Reich had
become a tool of Nazi propaganda, it was necessary to promote music that
was autonomous, devoid of any extramusical meaning, and impossible to
exploit for political purposes.61 They further constructed the notion that
because Nazi music policy was supposedly antimodern, the task of the new
German democracy was to resurrect modernism and to reintroduce the
works of composers whose music had allegedly been banned. With the
establishment of the Darmstaidter Ferienkurse in 1946, music critic
Wolfgang Steinecke set out to reanimate the modernism presumably
suppressed by the Nazis and other dictatorships and chose to feature the
works of Hindemith, Bart6k, Stravinsky, Krenek, Honegger, Shostakovich,
and Prokofiev, along with those of Wolfgang Fortner, Boris Blacher,
Hermann HeiB, and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, misleadingly implying that
the music of all of these composers had been silenced in the Third Reich.62
Adorno was also a key player in further endowing the diametrically
opposed categories of Nazi music and modern music with political signifi-
cance, promoting the idea that modernists were by and large progressive
in their political actions and, conversely, linking musical conservatism
with political conservatism. This led him to see Schoenberg as socially
clairvoyant,63 to label Rudolf Wagner-R6geny as a "fascist,"64 and to
presume, incorrectly, that the twelve-tone composer Winfried Zillig must
have been driven out of Nazi Germany and gone into exile.65 These
associations of modernism with the political left and musical conservatism
with the right held sway, reinforced in the 1960s with Peter Gay's influential
book Weimar Culture and persisting into the 1990s in Kater's first essays
on the music history of the Third Reich (Kater soon corrected his stance
in his more extensive studies).66 Diimling's recent essay elaborates on
them even more by referring to a generational conflict beginning in the
1920s between conservative neo-Romantics who "were nostalgic for the
empire," and the "decidedly anti-Romantic and antinationalistic younger
generation" (noting also that Nazi Kampflieder "were predominantly
diatonic in character" but failing to mention the equally predominant
diatonicism of leftist song repertoire).67
A new, alternative emphasis in defining Nazi music against what it
was not proposes that Nazi music was the antithesis of German music.
Giselher Schubert, for example, uses Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler
to show how non-Germans immediately recognized its German features,
thereby bestowing the work with "the sense of an antifascist confession."68
This rather circuitous argument is weakened by the fact that the foreign
observers he quotes-from Switzerland, Holland, and England-could
hardly have thought of themselves as antifascist in 1938, the year that
Mathis der Maler premiered in Zurich. Nevertheless, Schubert defends

Mathis against the charge that Hindemith composed a purely German
oeuvre to win favor with Nazi leaders. By arguing that the opera's subject,
German Renaissance painter Matthias Grtinewald, had been favored by
Weimar-era artists and literati but shunned by Rosenberg as an example
of "Semitic infiltration," Schubert misleads us into thinking that
Grtinewald's art was reviled or ignored during the Third Reich.69
Once again, evidence that has accumulated over the years continues
to challenge these negative parameters for Nazi music. To begin with,
many of the composers presumably brought out of silence in Darmstadt in
1946 had never been banned in the Third Reich. Stravinsky was far from
absent in Germany in the 1930s,70 and in fact the Nazi campaigns against
musical modernism seem to have abated after the first few years of the
regime. Even though the Degenerate Music exhibit of 1938 attacked
Schoenberg, Webem, Krenek, and Weill and singled out Schoenberg's
atonal music as a plot to undo the victorious "German invention" of the
triad, there were no concerted efforts to eliminate atonal or twelve-tone
composition in Nazi Germany. In a 1934 "tribute" marking Schoenberg's
sixtieth birthday, Herbert Gerigk, the music critic and employee of Nazi
ideologue Rosenberg, even claimed that in the right hands (i.e., in the
hands of a composer of pure blood and pure character), atonality could be
an effective means of expression.71 Thus Paul von Klenau, a Danish stu-
dent of Schoenberg's, managed to have his twelve-tone operas premiered
on major German stages in 1933, 1937, 1939, and 1940, and Zillig, who
also dabbled in such experiments, received commissions from the NS-
Kulturgemeinde and held a position in a local office of the Reich Music
Chamber.72 Finally, Adorno's assessments of modernist and conservative
composers and their politics were complicated by revelations of Schoenberg's
own nationalist sentiments and self-identification with the "bourgeois"
traditions of the past,73 by the touting of Wagner-R6geny in Communist
East Germany as a composer for the masses and thus antifascist,74 and by
the fact that Zillig, who did not emigrate, achieved a significant degree of
success in the Third Reich.
This is not to say that atonal and twelve-tone composition finally
enjoyed widespread appeal in the Third Reich, but rather to show that
modernism in a broader sense was not as reviled as many have assumed.
At the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Baden-Baden
from 1933 until the outbreak of the war, many modern composers, even
those who had flourished in the Weimar Republic, shared the spotlight
with younger, less conservative German composers as well as non-
Germans, as the xenophobia of the early years of the Third Reich had
subsided significantly. Contrary to popular belief, the music heard at
Baden-Baden was not predominantly of a late Romantic style, but rather

tended toward the neoclassicism of the 1920s, with strong echoes of
Hindemith and Stravinsky. Hindemith, meanwhile, continued to hope for
his rehabilitation in Germany, and his music played to rave reviews at
Baden-Baden and was widely praised in the German press. Bart6k was
equally well received in Baden-Baden, even after his well-publicized state-
ments against the Nazi government. With regard to the fate of twelve-
tone composition, Zillig and others had shifted their style away from
Schoenberg's teachings in the works performed at Baden-Baden; still,
according to Joan Evans, "one should not assume, however, that the changes
heard in post-1933 music of German composers at Baden-Baden and
elsewhere were due entirely to the necessity of adjusting to new cultural-
political realities. In music, as in other arts, the economic and political
upheavals of the 1930s triggered a widespread stylistic simplification." She
goes on to say that "despite the ideological differences that separated
Nazi Germany from her neighbors, the tonally oriented, nationally tinged
styles adopted by a broad range of composers in the 1930s made feasible
Germany's attempt, after the isolation of the early Nazi years, to reenter
the wider world of modern music."75
Future Tasks
The most obvious task for writing a revised history of music in the Third
Reich is to look objectively at the music created in the period. Perhaps
there is an underlying unease about finding similarities among the works
of composers we have come to regard as "good" and "bad" or, what is even
harder to rationalize with the image of a totalitarian dictatorship, about
discovering a greater degree of openness and freedom in compositional
style and musical consumption than we have thus far imagined. Yet the
aversion to studying the music that, one assumes, must be tainted because
it was produced in Nazi Germany has conceivably created confusion about
the meaning of musical nationalism and modernism, as ripe opportunities
to trace continuities and developments of musical trends both within and
beyond Germany may have been missed. The works of Werner Egk, Zillig,
Orff, and Wagner-Regeny need to be studied not for what makes their
music distinctly Nazi-because, as we know, many of their works from this
period actually thrived in the postwar repertoire76--but for the features
they might potentially share with other music we have come to regard as
worthy of inclusion in the canon. Similarities with the music of Stravinsky
and Schoenberg have already been observed in the works of Orff, Egk,
Zillig, and Klenau, and it may also be possible to rediscover the compositional
legacies of Strauss, Hindemith, Reger, Busoni, Weill, and Krenek in the

works of followers and contemporaries who thrived in Nazi Germany.77
This music must also be viewed in comparison with contemporary
trends in other countries, and not only the dictatorships of fascist Italy
and Stalinist Russia. When the Gesellschaft fOr Musikforschung first
openly confronted the topic of music in the Third Reich at its 1981
meeting in Bayreuth, its decision to juxtapose German music with that of
other countries under the rubric of Music in the 1930s seemed to evade a
direct confrontation with the Nazi past. In retrospect, however, this juxta-
position with the contemporary trends worldwide may have opened the
door to discovering important commonalities. Most of the contributions
tended to romanticize the 1920s and view the 1930s as an artistic low
point, but they did not restrict these negative characterizations to Nazi
Germany or other repressive regimes. Dahlhaus speaks of a compositional
"regression" and a turn toward "populism" not only in the Third Reich
and Stalinist Russia but also under democracies, while J6zsef Ujfalussy, in
a discussion of Eastern Europe, observes the widespread attraction to folk
culture (taking care, however, to distinguish the Eastern European varieties
from parallel trends serving German nationalism).78 Marius Flothuis, in
discussing the music of England, France, and Holland, pinpoints the Wall
Street crash as the dawn of the 1930s and characterizes the musical
climate of the decade as one of exhaustion, or at least a point of no return
in relation to the experiments of the 1920s, in some cases because many of
those experiments had been "tamed" and normalized by 1930.79 In the
closing summary, Albrecht Riethmiiller highlights other common trends,
such as turns toward neoclassicism, popular accessibility, ethical or reli-
gious subjects (juxtaposing Krenek's Karl V and Hindemith's Mathis der
Maler with Schoenberg's Moses und Aron), and the monumentality of the
symphony, not only in Germany but also in the United States.80 With
regard to racism and notions of degeneracy, Diimling has shown more
recently that the international (specifically American and British) reac-
tions to the notorious Degenerate Music exhibit were neutral, if not
sympathetic.81 Many nations, whether dictatorships or democracies, were
dealing with the Depression, world wars, rising nationalist sentiment,
racism, xenophobia, technological progress, and class and ethnic conflict.
Further comparative studies may reveal that many of the musical trends
we have come to regard specifically as Nazi, or somewhat more broadly as
fascist (in the growing number of studies that compare music and culture
under Hitler and Mussolini82), may be far more universal and characteris-
tic of the times.
Another task is to consider anew the function of music in Nazi
Germany. One of the few times the term "Nazi music" has been explicitly
invoked was in Riethmiiller's final presentation at the 1999 conference,

entitled "Nazi Music. Concluding Remarks" (not included in the published
proceedings). It centered around two film clips: one showing Furtwingler
conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for Hitler and his entourage in
a swastika-decked concert hall, the other showing Hitler arriving at
Bayreuth in his motorcade and being warmly greeted by Winifred
Wagner, underscored with the Meistersinger overture. This presentation,
which (probably intentionally) fell far short of defining the term "Nazi
music," prompted more questions than answers. Is Nazi music simply the
music used in conjunction with political ceremonies? Is it any symphony
or opera performed in the presence of Hitler, Goering, or Goebbels? If
Nazi music describes music used for Nazi functions, then how is this
employment different from any other use of music for political purposes,
in Germany and elsewhere? How does this differ, for example, from the
political exploitation of Beethoven from the founding of the Second Reich
in 1871 to the celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989?83
Nevertheless, Riethmiiller's presentation did draw attention to the
potentially powerful function of music in German society during the 1930s
and 1940s. The evidence of serious gaps between theory and practice in
the musical life of the Third Reich has shown how crucial it is to study the
function of music not only in its propaganda and ceremonial uses (nor
even merely in the new works commissioned for political functions), but
also in what was performed and consumed in a broader context. Despite
the highly publicized promotion of Wagner, music historians have
observed that the Hitler Youth shunned Wagner in favor of communal
music making, young composers of the 1920s and 1930s saw no purpose in
continuing along Wagner's path, and Wagner productions declined over-
all in the 1930s and 1940s.84 And despite the vilification of atonality and
jazz in the Degenerate Music exhibit (an event so shrill in its tone that
Raabe resigned as Music Chamber president in protest, and Goebbels,
who shunned the event, shut it down prematurely85), atonal and even
twelve-tone composition lived on, and American jazz enjoyed a greater
popularity during the Third Reich than during the Weimar Republic.
Random samples of repertoire lists of orchestras and opera houses, of radio
playlists, of record production, and of programs of amateur organizations
have revealed further surprises: the continued performance of "Jewish" or
"degenerate" composers such as Mendelssohn, Zemlinsky, and Berg, and a
healthy representation of foreign music.86 A more focused investigation of
performances of new compositions, furthermore, will also tell us much
about the public response to such novelties if their premieres are exam-
ined for the prestige of their venues, their critical reception, and above all
the longevity of the works beyond the first hearing. As we know from
studies on public opinion in the Third Reich, the Sicherheitsdienst

(Security Service) worked with other organizations to carefully monitor
reactions to current events, civil and military actions, and propaganda
campaigns. The opinions of the music-loving public, whether in the
form of Sicherheitsdienst reports, box office receipts, diaries, radio play-
lists, or other less obvious forms of documentation, may reveal further
surprises.
It seems inevitable that debates about the political culpability of
individuals will persist, especially if the stakes remain so high for composers,
for whom an up or down vote can determine inclusion in the canon. If
such is the case, then it is important to consider all the scholarship on
musical life in the Third Reich that, taken together, reveals the complexity
of the day-to-day existence of musicians and composers. Many are known
to have embraced the new regime for the promises it presented for regain-
ing self-worth, professional integrity, and economic security. At the same
time, the music community had witnessed in the first few years of the
regime how Schoenberg was compelled to resign his post at the Prussian
Academy of Arts, Bruno Walter was threatened and coerced into canceling
his German engagements, Hindemith was caught in the crossfire of the
Goebbels-Rosenberg rivalry and fled the country, and even the "Aryan"
composer and president of the Reich Music Chamber, Richard Strauss,
temporarily became a pariah for refusing to break off his collaboration
with Zweig. Musicians soon had to prove their Aryan lineage in order to
gain working papers, and no one was completely protected from the arbi-
trariness of political cronyism. It may therefore be advisable to adopt
the middle-ground interpretation around which historians seem to be
converging: having witnessed early acts of terror and intimidation in the
"revolutionary" period of the Third Reich, the majority of Germans led
their lives as before and took advantage of opportunities that came along
but considered the path of least resistance as the best way to proceed.
Although many in the music world may have rejoiced in Germany's
reclaimed dignity, enjoyed artistic freedoms as before, and reaped the ben-
efits of new economic safeguards, they also may have carefully considered
the potential risks of challenging authority, having observed the radical
tone of propaganda and the fate of unfortunate colleagues whose careers
and reputations were severely compromised as a result of arbitrary political
witch-hunts. Historian Robert Gellately, for one, has recently painted a
picture of a Third Reich dominated more by willing conformity than
repressive coercion, a particularly useful model for understanding musical
life. He concludes that Germans welcomed the antidotes the Nazis offered
for the chaos of the Weimar Republic in their promises to decrease unem-
ployment and in their projection of governmental stability and strength.
Any lingering doubts about the Nazi system were soon supplanted by
fierce nationalism once the war began, and radical measures, including
those that led to genocide, could proceed under 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 idea of a "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft)
actually encouraged many to denounce their friends and relatives and
made resistance that much more difficult.87
Finally, a key to understanding Nazi music as a historiographic phe-
nomenon may lie in a careful scrutiny of the experiences, perceptions, and
motives of musical figures driven out of Nazi Germany. The very theories
of totalitarianism sprung from the influential writings of a German living
in exile, Hannah Arendt, and many of the notions about the culture of
the Nazis that continue to dominate the discourse were first proposed by
her exiled compatriots: Adorno's declaration that no poetry could be writ-
ten after Auschwitz, and Walter Benjamin's influential formulation of
fascism fostering an aestheticization of politics. Recent studies in the cul-
tural realms have further shown how exiled artists were the most vocal in
proclaiming and redressing Nazi oppression, especially as the war began and,
as "aliens," they needed to demonstrate their commitment to democracy
and distance themselves as much as possible from Nazi cultural life. After
the Degenerate Art exhibit in 1937, artists living in exile even managed to
revive interest in modernism by promoting it as a relic of democracy and
individualism, long after it had been neglected in Britain and the United
States.88 With regard to music, Wagner scholars have shown that many of
the ongoing debates about Wagner's influence over Hitler, the Germans,
and the extermination policies of the Nazi government can be traced to
suggestions first offered by Germans in exile, which then gained momen-
tum after the war. Adorno's In Search of Wagner of 193 7-38 proposed that
the Ring had provided the Germans with a much needed mythology and
that Wagner's anti-Semitism could be detected not only in his prose but
also in the music dramas;89 Thomas Mann's 1938 essay "Brother Hitler"
placed the dictator within an artistic lineage going back to Wagner;90 and
Emil Ludwig in 1941 cited Wagner as one of the most dangerous figures in
German history.91 Mann later 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,92 and
Adorno's advocacy on behalf of Schoenberg (and simultaneous rejection
of Stravinsky and Strauss) contributed to setting the course for the zero-
hour musical ideology. By acquiescing to both Adorno and Mann in striv-
ing to create music that was value-free, devoid of extramusical meaning,
neutral, rational, and scientifically grounded, postwar composers were
trying to establish a healthier post-Holocaust relationship between

Germans and their music.
What, in the end, will be the fate of "Nazi music"? Ernst Bloch's oft-
cited observation that "the music of the Nazis is not the prelude to Meis-
tersinger, but rather the Horst Wessel Song [the unofficial Nazi national
anthem]'"93 may be useful if we restrict the definition of Nazi music to the

narrow parameters of the song literature of the Nazi party and its affiliate
groups. Even then, one should not expect to unlock any clues about the
musical peculiarities of a Nazi aesthetic by examining the repertoire, as
the songs, unique only in their graphic texts, relied on borrowed melodies
or militaristic styles virtually indistinguishable from the song literature of
the left wing. Yet perhaps it is too early to abandon the concept of Nazi
music entirely, for it is a pervasive shorthand that may remain a part of
our consciousness until we gain a more nuanced understanding of the
period and its musical life. Eventually, however, even the term "Nazi" may
come to represent little more than a caricature, a catchall that embodies
an outdated historical narrative in which a force of evil arose out of
nowhere, overtook Germany from 1933 to 1945, and ceased to exist once
the Allies restored order and goodness. "Nazi" may become a term that
functioned for a period of time as an anti-model, a symbol from which
postwar generations derived comfort in their perceived distance and dif-
ference from it, but which lost its usefulness once a more multifaceted
understanding of the era was gained.
Notes
Pamela M. Potter is Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She

has written extensively on music and politics in twentieth-century Germany and is best
known for her work on the history of German musicology (Most German of the Arts: Musi-
cology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich, 1998; German ed.:
2000) and on the connections between music and identity (Music and German National
Identity, co-edited with Celia Applegate, 2002). Her current projects include a history of
musical life in twentieth-century Berlin and a book on Nazi aesthetics in the visual and
performing arts. E-mail address: pmpotter@wisc.edu.
Earlier versions of this article were delivered as lectures for the music departments at
Duke University, University of Chicago, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford
University, University of Notre Dame, and Tufts University, and at the Center for
German and European Studies at the University of Wisconsin. I would like to express
my deepest gratitude to the many colleagues who took the time to read the manuscript
at various stages and offered their valuable criticisms and suggestions: Celia Applegate,
Joseph Auner, Philip Bohlman, Joy Calico, Charles Dill, Joan Evans, Jane Fulcher,
Bryan Gilliam, Thomas Grey, and Richard Taruskin.
1. Joan L. Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi
Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 100.
2. Bernd Sponheuer, "The National Socialist Discussion on the 'German Quality' in

Music," in Music and Nazism: Art Under Tyranny, 1933-1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and
Albrecht Riethmaller (Laaber: Laaber, 2003), 37.
3. See Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern

Europe and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Eric Salzman, Twentieth-Century
Music: An Introduction, 4th ed., Prentice Hall History of Music (Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002); Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Schirmer, 1988); and Bryan Simms, Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and
Structure, 2nd ed. (New York: Schirmer, 1996).
4. Such composers include Paul Graener, Werner Egk, Wolfgang Fortner, Winfried
Zillig, Paul von Klenau, Hermann Reutter, Ernst Pepping, Kurt Thomas, Johann
Nepomuk David, and Hugo Distler. Like Carl Orff in West Germany, Ottmar Gerster and
Rudolf Wagner-R geny managed to downplay their Nazi-era successes and rose to promi-
nence in East Germany after the war.
5. Quote from report of the U.S. Information Control Division (Dec. 1945), David
Monod, "Verklarte Nacht: Denazifying Musicians under Nazi Control," in Music and
Nazism, 297.
6. David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans,
1945-1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 5-6, 47, 139-43.
7. Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Das Ende des Reiches und die Neubildung deutscher Staaten, 9th
ed., Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte 22 (Munich: DAV, 1980), 112-22.
8. Quote from the "Manual for the Control of German Information Services [1945],"
Monod, "Verklarte Nacht," 298.
9. Monod, Settling Scores, 128-66.
10. On the origins of this term and the ensuing controversies, see Reinhold Grimm,
"Innere Emigration als Lebensform," in Exil und innere Emigration: Third Wisconsin
Workshop, Wissenschaftliche Paperbacks Literaturwissenschaft 17, ed. Jost Hermand and
Reinhold Grimm (Frankfurt/Main: Athenium Verlag, 1972), 31-73.
11. For discussions of Pfitzner and Strauss, see Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi
Era: Eight Portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jens Malte Fischer, "The
Very German Fate of a Composer: Hans Pfitzner," in Music and Nazism, 75-89; Michael
H. Kater, "Culture, Society, and Politics in the Cosmos of 'Hans Pfitzner the German',"
in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela M. Potter
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 178-89; Albrecht Riethmuiller, "Stefan
Zweig and the Fall of the Reich Music Chamber President, Richard Strauss," in Music and
Nazism, 269-91; and Pamela M. Potter, "Strauss and the National Socialists: The Debate
and Its Relevance," in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed.
Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 93-113.
12. On Huber, see Peter Petersen, "Wissenschaft und Widerstand: Ober Kurt Huber
(1893-1943)," in Die dunkle Last: Musik und Nationalsozialismus, Schriften zur Musikwis-
senschaft und Musiktheorie 3, ed. Brunhilde Sonntag, Hans-Werner Boresch, and Detlef
Gojowy (Cologne: Bela Verlag, 1999), 111-29; and Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the
Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 120-24.
13. See Roman Brotbeck, "Verdraingung und Abwehr. Die verpaBte Vergangenheitsbe-
wdaltigung in Friedrich Blumes Enzykloptdie 'Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart',"
in Musikwissenschaft-eine verspdtete Disziplin? Die akademische Musikforschung zwischen
Fortschrittsglauben und Modernitiitsverweigerung, ed. Anselm Gerhard (Stuttgart: Metzler,
2000), 273-79. Stanley Sadie made a concerted effort to correct this lacuna in the second
edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, enlisting Erik Levi and others
to correct the entries on composers active in the Third Reich.
14. Other popular examinations include Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil's Music Master:
The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwangler (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992); Bernd W. Wessling, Furtwangler: Eine kritische Biographie (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Verlags-Anstalt, 1985); and Fred K. Prieberg, Kraftprobe: Wilhelm Furtwiingler im Dritten
Reich (Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus, 1986), translated into English by Christopher Dolan
as Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwangler in the Third Reich (Boston, MA: Northeastern
University Press, 1994).
15. As late as the 1990s, Michael Kater met with resistance when trying to interview
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. See Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the
Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 61.
16. Historian Joseph Wulf's incendiary publication of documents on music in the

Third Reich (Musik im Dritten Reich, Kunst und Kultur im Dritten Reich 2 [Gutersloh:
Sigbert Mohn, 1963]) prompted the musicology establishment to brand him as a liar. See
Hans-Giinter Klein, "Vorwort. Verdrangung und Aufarbeitung," in Musik und Musikpolitik
in faschistischen Deutschland, ed. Hanns-Werner Heister and Hans-Giinter Klein (Frankfurt/
Main: Fischer, 1984), 9. Thereafter, two American dissertations in history appeared in
1970 but remained largely unnoticed for many years: Michael Meyer, "Assumptions and
Implementation of Nazi Policy toward Music" (PhD diss., University of California-Los
Angeles, 1970), and Donald Wesley Ellis, "Music in the Third Reich: National Socialist
Aesthetic Theory as Governmental Policy" (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1970).
17. Klein, "Vorwort," 9.
18. Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1982), and Heister
and Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik.
19. Claudia Maurer Zenck, "Zwischen Boykott und Anpassung an den Charackter der
Zeit: Ober die Schwierigkeiten eines deutschen Komponisten mit dem Dritten Reich,"
Hindemith-Jahrbuch 9 (1980): 65-129.
20. Kater, Twisted Muse, 6; Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era; and Michael Meyer,
The Politics of Music in the Third Reich, American University Studies Series 9, vol. 49
(New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
21. Kater, "Introduction," Music and Nazism, 12.
22. Giselher Schubert, "The Aesthetic Premises of a Nazi Conception of Music," in

Music and Nazism, 70-71.
23. Stephen Brockmann, "German Culture at the 'Zero Hour'," in Revisiting Zero Hour
1945: The Emergence of Postwar German Culture, ed. Frank Trommler and Stephen
Brockmann, Humanities Program Report 1 (Washington, DC: American Institute for
Contemporary German Studies, 1996), 12-13.
24. Hans Richter, quoted in Brockmann, "German Culture," 17.
25. Renate Finkh, quoted in Brockmann, "German Culture," 21.
26. Quoted in Monod, Settling Scores, 116.
27. See Monod, Settling Scores, 261; and Amy Beal, "Negotiating Cultural Allies:
American Music in Darmstadt, 1946-1958," Journal of the American Musicological Society
53 (2000): 107-8.
28. The postwar perception of a Nazi music aesthetic came to have opposite meanings
in East and West Germany: initially both sides agreed that it was necessary to learn about
all the music supposedly not heard in Nazi Germany in order to encourage new musical
trends in postwar Germany-this included music of the avant-garde, as well as any music
from former enemy countries. By 1950, however, the Soviets enforced their own aesthetic
policies in East Germany that judged music of the avant-garde as formalist and therefore
unacceptable. Meanwhile, West Germany responded to this proclamation by encouraging
all that the Soviets rejected. Thus the music consultants in the U.S. military worked
closely with the organizers of the Summer Courses for International New Music in
Darmstadt to formulate a Cold War musical response to Communist music policy and
encouraged all that the Soviets dismissed. Both sides, however, implicitly believed that
they were differentiating postwar German musical life from that of the Third Reich.
29. See for example Sabine von Dirke, "'Where Were You 1933-1945?': The Legacy of
the Nazi Past Beyond the Zero Hour," in Revisiting Zero Hour 1945, 71-88.
30. Klein, "Vorwort," 9-10.
31. "Die Musik der 1930er Jahre," in Bericht iiber den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen
Kongress Bayreuth 1981, Gesellschaft far Musikforschung, ed. Christoph-Hellmut Mahling
and Sigrid Wiesmann (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1984), 142-82, 471-503; an expanded version
of Albrecht Riethmiller's paper appeared as "Komposition im Deutschen Reich um 1936,"
in Archiv ftir Musikwissenschaft 38, no. 4 (1983): 241-78.
32. "Wer sich mit der Musik und mit dem Musikleben im Dritten Reich beschaftigt,
muB sich die Frage stellen: hat der Nationalsozialismus in der Musikgeschichte gewirkt?
Hat er mehr bewirkt, als namenloses Elend ffir zahllose Unschuldige? Mehr als den
(vorzeitigen) Tod vieler Menschen und mithin auch Musiker? Vielleicht hat er ver-
hindert, daB einige Meisterwerke entstanden sind; an denen, die entstanden sind, hat er
keinen Anteil. (Sie waren ihm zuwider.) Positiv hat er gar nichts bewirkt, nur zerst6rt. Er
hat den schon langer beobachteten ProzeB der Rebarbarisierung der Menschen gef6rdert.
Nicht mehr und nicht weniger." Rudolf Stephan, "Zur Musik der DreiBigerjahre," in
Bericht iber den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981, 147.
33. Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd ed.
(London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 21-22.
34. Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, chap. 1-3; and Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi
Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
35. Mary Fulbrook, The Divided Nation: A History of Germany 1918-1990 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 69; see also Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, chap. 4; and
Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 257.
36. Fulbrook, Divided Nation, 51. More recently, Peter Fritzsche argued that unlike the less
successful single-issue parties, the Nazi party succeeded by promoting an idea of community
that would unite all (non-Jewish) Germans, obliterate their deep-seated rivalries, and
promise a bright future. This vision enabled the Nazi party to appeal to the vast majority
who were disillusioned with alternatives across the political spectrum and to attract vot-
ers from all economic classes. He states: "The National Socialists embodied a broad but
extremely vague desire for national renewal and social reform that neither Wilhelmine
nor Weimar Germany had been able to satisfy. ... [They] twisted together strands from
the political Left and the political Right without being loyal to the precepts of either
camp." Peter Fritzsche, Germans Into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998), especially 197-214 (quote from 212-14).
37. Giselher Schubert, "Germany," 1:5, Grove Music Online, http://www.grovemusic.com
(accessed 27 Jan. 2006) ed. L. Macy.
38. Reinhold Brinkmann, "The Distorted Sublime: Music and National Socialist
Ideology--A Sketch," in Music and Nazism, 50.
39. Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson, 2002),
272-73.
40. Spotts, Hitler, 272-76

41. Brinkmann, "The Distorted Sublime," 45.
42. Michael Walter, Hitler in der Oper: Deutsches Musikleben 1919-1945 (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1995), 195-98.
43. Albrecht Dimling, "The Target of Racial Purity: The 'Degenerate Music' Exhibition
in Daisseldorf, 1938," in Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich, ed. Richard Etlin
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 54.
44. Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers
of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1993), 138-42.
45. See Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Hans Dieter Schafer, Das gespaltene Bewuj3tsein:
Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933-1945, 2nd ed. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1982),
133-38; and Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Hitler's Dancers: German Modern Dance and
the Third Reich, trans. Jonathan Steinberg (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 167-89.
46. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 213-62.
47. Celia Applegate, "The Past and Present of Hausmusik in the Third Reich," in Music
and Nazism, 145-47.
48. Kim H. Kowalke, "Music and Publishing and the Nazis: Schott, Universal Edition,
and Their Composers," in Music and Nazism, 170-218; Stephen McClatchie, "Wagner
Research as 'Service to the People': The Richard-Wagner Forschungsstitte, 1938-1945," in
Music and Nazism, 160.
49. Guido Heldt, "Hardly Heroes: Composers as a Subject in National Socialist

Cinema," in Music and Nazism, 116.
50. Kater, Twisted Muse, 178-79.
51. "Es wirde nun aber schlimm sein, wenn der Nationalsozialismus auf der einen Seite
den Geist einer Zeit besiegt, der zur Ursache fir das Verblassen unserer musikalischen
Schopferkraft wurde, auf der anderen aber durch eine falsche Zielsetzung selbst mithilft,
die Musik auf einem Irrweg zu belassen oder gar zu fiihren, der genauso schlimm ist wie die
hinter uns liegende allgemeine Verwirrung." Quoted in Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 196.
52. Hans Rudolf Vaget, "Hitler's Wagner: Musical Discourse as Cultural Space," in
Music and Nazism, 15-31.
53. Riethmiller, "Stefan Zweig," in Music and Nazism, 270.
54. See Carl Dahlhaus, "Politische Implikationen der Operndramaturgie. Zu einigen

deutschen Opern der DreiBiger Jahre," and Hans-Gunter Klein, "Atonalitdt in den Opern
von Paul von Klenau und Winfried Zillig-zur Duldung einer im Nationalsozialismus ver-
femten Kompositionstechnik," in Bericht iuber den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen
Kongress Bayreuth 1981, 148-53 and 490-94.
55. Klein, "Viel Konformitat und wenig Verweigerung: Zur Komposition neuer Opern
1933-1944," in Musik und Musikpolitik, 145-48.'

56. Erik Levi, "Toward an Aesthetic of Fascist Opera," in Fascism and Theatre:
Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945, ed.
Giinter Berghaus (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996), 264.
57. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 175-213.
58. Dimling, "Target of Racial Purity," 53-54.

59. Lucia Sziborsky, "Adornos Musikphilosophie und die Nazi-Asthetik," 23-41;
Hans-Werner Boresch, "'Zersetzender Intellektualismus' und 'apodiktischer Glaube': Die
Nationalsozialisten in der Tradition des Antirationalismus," 64-91; and Bettina Schliiter,
"Paradoxie und Ritualisierung-Die 'Kirchenmusikalische Erneuerungsbewegung' und der
Nationalsozialismus," 130-45, all three essays in Die dunkle Last.
60. Thomas Eickhoff, "'Harmonika-Heil': Ober ein Musikinstrument und seine

Ideologisierung im Nationalsozialismus," in Die dunkle Last, 146-83.
61. Gesa Kordes, "Darmstadt, Postwar Experimentation, and the West German Search
for a New Musical Identity," in Music and German National Identity, 205-17.
62. Danielle Fosler-Lussier has done extensive research in this area for her study on
Bart6k's legacy and the Cold War; I am grateful to her for sharing with me her work in
progress.
63. "Wahrend es sich herausstellen wird, daB die diffamierte, 'isolierte' Produktion
Sch6nbergs nach dem MaB ihrer eigenen sachlich musikalischen Konsistenz viel wahrer
die gesellschaftlichen Anliegen vertritt, die von der Gemeinschaftsmusik durch Anpassung
an die Linie des geringsten Widerstands verfflscht werden." Theodor W. Adorno, "Die
Geschichte der deutschen Musik von 1908 bis 1933," in Musikalische Schriften VI,
Gesammelte Schriften ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Klaus Schultz, vol. 19 (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1984), 622.
64. Adorno, "Geschichte der deutschen Musik," 628.
65. Fred K. Prieberg, "Nach dem 'Endsieg' oder Musiker-Mimikry," in Musik und Musik-
politik, 300.
66. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row,
1968), and Michael H. Kater, "The Revenge of the Fathers: The Demise of Modern
Music at the End of the Weimar Republic," German Studies Review 15, no. 2 (1992):
295-315.
67. Dimling, "Target of Racial Purity," 44, 50.

68. Schubert, "Nazi Conception of Music," in Music and Nazism, 70.
69. Much to the contrary, a search of Nazi-era literature reveals at least twenty titles
dedicated to Grinewald scholarship and lore.
70. Joan Evans, "Stravinsky's Music in Hitler's Germany," Journal of the American
Musicological Society 56, no. 3 (2003): 525-94.
71. Herbert Gerigk, "Eine Lanze ffir Sch6nberg," Die Musik 27 (1934): 89.
72. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, 303-06.
73. Werner Schmidt-Faber, "Atonalitdt im Dritten Reich," in Herausforderung
Schdnberg: Was die Musik des Jahrhunderts veranderte, ed. Ulrich Dibelius (Munich:
Carl Hanser Verlag, 1974), 122-24.
74. See for example Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler der Deutschen Demokratischen
Republik (Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, 1959), 191.
75. Joan Evans, "'International with National Emphasis': The Internationales Zeitgenbs-
sisches Musikfest in Baden-Baden, 1936-1939," in Music and Nazism, 108.
76. Egk's Circe, written during the war, was touted in 1948 as "modishly modern," and
Mathis der Maler was similarly publicized in 1946 as "utterly new" (Monod, Settling Scores,
260), while Wagner-Regeny's operas Die Biirger von Calais, Johanna Balk, and Der
Ginstling (all composed between 1935 and 1940) went on to succeed in East German
opera houses. See Gerd Rienacker, "Klassizismus oderals Moderne?-Rings um die Oper
Die Burger von Calais von Rudolf Wagner-R6geny," in Die dunkle Last, 391-404.
77. Evans, "'International with National Emphasis'," 108, and Rienacker, "Klassizismus
oderals Moderne?" 397. See also the Nazi-era observations that Egk's opera Peer Gynt,
premiering in 1938, closely resembled the music of Weill and Krenek (Walter, Hitler in
der Oper, 178-80).
78. Carl Dahlhaus, "Politische Implikationen," 148-49, and J6zsef Ujfalussy, "Musik-
politische Lehren der DreiBiger Jahre in Ost-Europa," 168-69, in Bericht iiber den inter-
nationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981.
79. Marius Flothuis, "Elan und Ermidung: Musik um 1930 in England, Frankreich und
den Niederlanden," in Bericht iiber den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress
Bayreuth 1981, 154-55, 157.
80. Albrecht Riethmuiller, "Die DreiBiger Jahre: Eine Dekade kompositorischer

Ermiidung oder Konsolidierung? Zusammenfassung der Diskussion," in Bericht aiber den
internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981, 176-77, 179.
81. Diimling, "Target of Racial Purity," 61.
82. See for example Fascism and Theatre; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, "Italian Fascists and National
Socialists: The Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship," in Art, Culture, and Media, 257-84;
Andrea Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf: Die Beziehungen zwischen
"Drittem Reich" und faschistischem Italien in den Bereichen Medien, Kunst, Wissenschaft und
Rassenfragen (Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1998); and Jirg Stenzl, "Fascismo--kein Thema?"
in Musikforschung-Faschismus-Nationalsozialismus: Referate der Tagung Schloss Engers
(8. bis 11. Mdrz 2000), ed. Isolde v. Foerster, Christoph Hust, and Christoph-Hellmut
Mahling (Mainz: Are-Edition, 2001), 143-50.
83. David Dennis's study of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony offers a telling example of
the political appeal of the symphony for a period of over 150 years of German history.
Beethoven in German Politics, 1870-1989 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
84. Reinhold Brinkmann, "Wagners Aktualitdt fir den Nationalsozialismus: Fragmente

einer Bestandsaufnahme," in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich: Ein Schloss Elmau-Symposion,
ed. Saul FriedlTnder and Jmrn Risen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2000), 112-14, 121-22; Henry
Bair, "Die Lenkung der Berliner Opernhauser," in Musik und Musikpolitik, 88; Hubert
Kolland, "Wagner und der deutsche Faschismus," in Musik und Musikpolitik, 126-35; and
Kolland, "Wagner-Rezeption im deutschen Faschismus," in Bericht iiber den internationalen
musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981, 494-503.
85. Diimling, "Target of Racial Purity," 60.
86. On radio, see Rita von der Grin, "Funktionen und Formen von Musiksendungen in
Rundfunk," in Musik und Musikpolitik, 98-106; on record production, see Martin Elste,
"Zwischen Privatheit und Politik: Die Schallplattenindustrie im NS-Staat," in Musik und
Musikpolitik, 107-14. On the performance of Mendelssohn, see for example Antoinette
Hellkuhl, "'Hier sind wir versammelt zu l1blichem Tun': Der Deutsche Singerbund in
faschistischer Zeit," in Musik und Musikpolitik, 199; and Pamela M. Potter, "The Nazi
'Seizure' of the Berlin Philharmonic, or the Decline of a Bourgeois Musical Institution,"
in National Socialist Cultural Policy, ed. Glenn R. Cuomo (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1995), 53-54.
87. Gellately, Backing Hitler, 257-63.
88. Keith Holz, "The Exiled Artists from Nazi Germany and their Art," in Art, Culture,
and Media, 343-67.
89. Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London and
New York: Verso, 1984), 114-29.
90. Hans Rudolf Vaget, "'Du warst mein Feind von je': The Beckmesser Controversy
Revisited," in Wagner's Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation, ed. Nicholas
Vaszonyi (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 190-91.
91. Horst Weber, "Das Fremde im Eignenen: Zum Wandel des Wagnerbildes im Exil,"
in Wagner im Dritten Reich, 215; Spotts, Hitler, 240-44.
92. Hans Rudolf Vaget, "National and Universal: Thomas Mann and the Paradox of
'German' Music," in Music and German National Identity, 155-77.
93. Ernst Bloch, Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormarz (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,

1970), 320.

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What Is "Nazi Music"?

Author(s): Pamela M. Potter

What Is "Nazi Music"?

doi: 10.1093/musqtl/gdi019 88:428-455

Germany often gravitate toward fulfilling the denazification-inspired task of

The Legacy of Denazification

occupation, for example, German musicians and composers initially were

additional classifications hardly ventured beyond the five categories of

to these individuals but, in the case of composers, also to rediscover and

The Musical Zero Hour

German democracy.28 Musicians, composers, critics, and policymakers

By this time, however, historians had thoroughly questioned and largely

in the historical interpretation of Nazi Germany as a totalitarian state.

"those composers who did not participate in the obligatory composition of

Hitler grounded Nazi policy on music according to his own predilections.

These recent attempts to perpetuate the image of a tightly run musi-

flexibly adapted to suit the conditions of different cultural fields."49 More

Mathis der Maler premiered in Zurich. Nevertheless, Schubert defends

Baden-Baden was not predominantly of a late Romantic style, but rather

legacies of Strauss, Hindemith, Reger, Busoni, Weill, and Krenek in the

invoked was in Riethmiiller's final presentation at the 1999 conference,

studies on public opinion in the Third Reich, the Sicherheitsdienst

trying to establish a healthier post-Holocaust relationship between

anthem]'"93 may be useful if we restrict the definition of Nazi music to the

Pamela M. Potter is Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She

2. Bernd Sponheuer, "The National Socialist Discussion on the 'German Quality' in

3. See Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern

9. Monod, Settling Scores, 128-66.

16. Historian Joseph Wulf's incendiary publication of documents on music in the

17. Klein, "Vorwort," 9.

21. Kater, "Introduction," Music and Nazism, 12.

22. Giselher Schubert, "The Aesthetic Premises of a Nazi Conception of Music," in

24. Hans Richter, quoted in Brockmann, "German Culture," 17.

25. Renate Finkh, quoted in Brockmann, "German Culture," 21.

26. Quoted in Monod, Settling Scores, 116.

30. Klein, "Vorwort," 9-10.

40. Spotts, Hitler, 272-76

46. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 213-62.

49. Guido Heldt, "Hardly Heroes: Composers as a Subject in National Socialist

50. Kater, Twisted Muse, 178-79.

53. Riethmiller, "Stefan Zweig," in Music and Nazism, 270.

54. See Carl Dahlhaus, "Politische Implikationen der Operndramaturgie. Zu einigen

1933-1944," in Musik und Musikpolitik, 145-48.'

57. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 175-213.

58. Dimling, "Target of Racial Purity," 53-54.

60. Thomas Eickhoff, "'Harmonika-Heil': Ober ein Musikinstrument und seine

64. Adorno, "Geschichte der deutschen Musik," 628.

67. Dimling, "Target of Racial Purity," 44, 50.

80. Albrecht Riethmuiller, "Die DreiBiger Jahre: Eine Dekade kompositorischer

81. Diimling, "Target of Racial Purity," 61.

84. Reinhold Brinkmann, "Wagners Aktualitdt fir den Nationalsozialismus: Fragmente

85. Diimling, "Target of Racial Purity," 60.

87. Gellately, Backing Hitler, 257-63.

93. Ernst Bloch, Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormarz (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,

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