By Albrecht Dümling
Germany under the Nazis was deprived of a great number of talented artists who had to leave their country as a consequence of restrictions and persecution. But a majority of German musicians had rather different experiences. For them, Hitler's coming to power offered new opportunities and fulfilled some of their old dreams. The idea of a central organization of all German musicians, an office for music, was one such dream. After Hitler's arrival as German chancellor, it took only a few months until a Reich Music Chamber was established, in November 1933. Richard Strauss was named its president, Wilhelm Furtwängler his deputy. These experienced men discovered that music received much more state support than under any former German government.
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By Harvey Sachs
The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) was one of Germany's most celebrated performing musicians, and his reputation has grown to almost mythical proportions in the five-and-a-half decades since his death. But the controversy surrounding his political behavior during the 1930s and '40s has never let up. There are those who declare that Furtwängler - who was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and State Opera when Hitler's National Socialists came to power in 1933, and who continued to work in Germany until three months before the end of the Second World War - approved of the Nazis; according to others, he merely used them to further his career; and many claim that he actively opposed them.
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By Juliane Brand
Germany and Austria were transformed by the forced expatriation of Jews during the 1930s and 1940s. No less transformative was the influx of exiles into the countries willing to give them refuge. Artists, writers, scientists and intellectuals who established vital spheres of activity in their new homelands seminally affected the arts, sciences, humanities and even national sensibilities. Most easily identifiable as agents of transformation were those figures who had already achieved some degree of public stature, but regular folk - workers and professionals living private lives in circumscribed spheres - likewise had a significant, if more subtle, collective cultural impact, as can be seen in changes to national cuisines and fashions, and in the more intangible areas of international awareness and tolerance of the Other.
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By Agnes Kory
Unlike the so–called Terezín composers — Viktor Ullman, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and Hans Krása — whose names and works have become relatively well known in recent years, the Hungarian Jewish composers who were murdered during the Holocaust remain nearly unknown. All seven of those who have been rediscovered so far died young, before they had fulfilled their potential. Yet, in spite of adverse circumstances, all had produced work of value. The amount of work that appears to have survived varies; what they shared was an untimely, tragic end, followed by artistic oblivion. The following information about the seven Hungarian Jewish composers (presented here in alphabetical order) is the fruit of my attempts, so far, to rectify the situation.
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By Sophie Fetthauer
In considering musical life during the Third Reich, and especially the consequences of Nazi policies regarding music, one inevitably comes across a variety of people: perpetrators, collaborators and followers – creators and representatives of the National Socialist German state – as well as victims and opponents of the regime. The approach to research may differ: banned professions and censorship may be the subjects, as may the development of professions, schools, musical institutions and branches of musical economy; musical life in the Jewish Cultural League, in the ghettos and concentration camps; aspects of assimilation and “brain gain” in the countries of exile; “brain drain” and the loss of traditions and knowledge in Europe; internal exile and remigration; and, finally, the history of composition, conditions of reception etc. Whatever perspective one chooses, every subject is connected with musicians whose lives were disrupted or even destroyed, or who at least were turned in another direction.
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By Gregorio Nardi
“In Italy there is absolutely no differentiation between Jews and non–Jews, in all fields, from religion to politics to the military to the economy... Italian Jews have their new Zion here, in this adorable land of ours.” These words by Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, were published in 1920 in Il Popolo d'Italia, the newspaper of which he was editor–in–chief. And yet, one year earlier Mussolini had inveighed, in the same newspaper, against the occult powers of “International Judaism.” Thus, by following denigration with reassurance, he began the slow process of building up racist philosophy, which had seemed completely extraneous to the history and culture of Italy once the country's reunification was complete (1870).
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By Michael Haas
It was in the mid–1980s when, as a producer for London Records, I first discussed a short series of works by Alexander Zemlinsky to be recorded with Berlin's Radio Symphony Orchestra and its new music director, Riccardo Chailly. The manager of the orchestra and source of this suggestion was the composer and conductor Peter Ruzicka.
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By Lily E. Hirsch
The Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), originally called the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (Culture League of German Jews), was a performing arts ensemble by and for Jews, created in Berlin in collaboration with the National Socialist regime. The Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service) of April 7, 1933, generally dismissed non–Aryans — defined at that time as any person descended from a Jewish parent or grandparent — from holding positions in the public sphere, especially at cultural institutions such as state–run music conservatories, opera houses, concert halls and theaters. From 1933 to 1941, the League was the most significant site in Nazi Germany that still allowed, and, paradoxically, even encouraged Jews to participate in music as well as theater.
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By Pamela Potter
During the twelve years of the Third Reich's existence, there was no shortage of hyperbole in the representation of art's role and artists' obligations within the new state. Anyone who approaches the subject will be familiar with Leni Riefenstahl's brilliant piece of film propaganda, Triumph of the Will, with the sleek and imposing neoclassicism of the Olympic stadium and Reich Chancellery, with their muscle bound statuary and with Paul Ludwig Troost's House of German Art. Digging deeper, one discovers that Hitler laid the cornerstone for this art museum amidst a pompous procession of the history of “German” art that borrowed shamelessly from ancient Greece, and that the museum's grand opening in 1937 featured not only a hand-selected collection of works considered truly German but also an accompanying exhibit of illegally seized modernist art displayed, mockingly, as the “degenerate” work of charlatans, racial inferiors and the mentally deranged.
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By Christopher Hailey
Two generations of composers shaped the musical landscape during the first half of the twentieth century. The first transformed the inherited world of late Romanticism with vertiginous flights of fantasy. A second generation, which came of age in the 1920s, turned away from Romantic ecstasy and mixed high and low, serious and popular, bourgeois and proletarian. These generations shared a common heritage but pursued widely disparate cultural, aesthetic, and even political and philosophical preoccupations.
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