The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  But Goebbels had not reckoned with the continuing machinations of his rival on the cultural-political scene, Alfred Rosenberg. Largely inspired by Rosenberg, a series of vitriolic attacks on Hindemith’s past musical style and previous political affiliations appeared in the musical press in the course of 1934, and pressure was put on radio stations and concert agencies to ban performances of his work. In response to this campaign, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler wrote a stout defence of the composer in a daily newspaper on 25 November. Unfortunately, in doing so, the conductor chose to generalize his attack on the denunciations of Hindemith’s work in the Nazi musical press. ‘Where would we be,’ he asked rhetorically, ‘if political denunciations in the broadest sense were applied to art?’ The affair escalated when Furtwängler’s appearance on the rostrum at a performance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in the Berlin State Opera on the day of publication of his article was met by noisy demonstrations of support from the audience, who clearly felt that the conductor was defending artistic freedom against interference from the regime. Both Goebbels and Goring were present in the theatre to witness the demonstration. This put the whole affair onto a new level. Goebbels now closed ranks with Rosenberg in the face of this open opposition to the regime’s cultural policies. On 4 December, Goebbels forced Furtwängler to resign from all his posts in the Berlin State Opera, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Reich Music Chamber. From now on, he would have to earn his living as a freelance. In a speech delivered to representatives of the creative arts in the Sports Palace on 6 December, the Propaganda Minister noted that Furtwängler had declared that Hindemith’s days as a musical provocateur were over. But: ‘ideological derailments cannot be excused by dismissing them as juvenilia’. That Hindemith was ‘of pure Germanic origin’ merely showed ‘how deeply the Jewish-intellectual infection has already eaten into our own racial body’.209

  Shocked by the suddenness of his downfall, Furtwängler met Goebbels on 28 February 1935 and told the Minister of his regret at the political implications that some had drawn from his original article. He had in no way intended, he assured the Minister, to criticize the artistic policies of the regime.210 By 27 July 1936 Goebbels was noting a ‘long conversation with Furtwängler in the garden at Wahnfried. He tells me all his concerns’, noted the Propaganda Minister, ‘sensibly and cleverly. He has learned a lot and is completely with us.’211 Already in April 1935 Furtwängler was performing in his new capacity as guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. In his absence, the orchestra’s last remaining Jewish players, whom he had insisted on retaining while he had still been conductor-in-chief, had been fired. Furtwängler did very well in his new position. In 1939 he earned well over 200,000 Reichsmarks from this job and other sources, roughly a hundred times the annual income of the average manual labourer. He still considered leaving Germany, and early in 1936 he was offered the post of chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic. But Goring made it clear that, if he accepted, he would not be allowed back. And Furtwängler’s capitulation to Goebbels the year before had aroused fierce criticism in the United States. He had since then conducted Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg at the Nuremberg Party Rally of 1935, where harsh discriminatory laws were promulgated against Germany’s Jewish community. Not only the New York Philharmonic’s Jewish supporters, but also many others, voiced their concern and threatened to boycott the orchestra if he was appointed. If Furtwängler had ever wanted to leave Germany for a top job in the USA, then he had simply left it too late. So he stayed on, to the plaudits of the regime.212

  Hindemith himself went on indefinite leave of absence from his teaching position in Berlin, but stayed on in Germany for a while, trying to retrieve the situation by publicly distancing himself from atonal music and swearing an oath of allegiance to Hitler. His efforts on behalf of musical education might also have recommended him to the regime. His work continued to be performed in small concerts on the fringes of national musical life, and he received a commission for a new piece from Göring’s air force. But attacks on him continued in the press, and opera directors and concert organizers were generally too nervous after the débâcle of Matthias the Painter to include his works in their repertoire. Most decisively of all, Hitler himself had never forgotten the notoriety that Hindemith had gained with his opera News of the Day in the 1920s. In 1936, Hitler used a speech at the annual Nuremberg Rally to urge the Party to redouble its efforts to purify the arts. The Propaganda Ministry promptly banned any more performances of Hindemith’s music. The composer’s treatise on harmony was exhibited at the Degenerate Music show in 1938, and Hindemith emigrated to Switzerland, where the first performance of his opera Matthias the Painter took place in May. From there he eventually left for the United States. In the end, what counted most was not his attempt to ingratiate himself artistically with the regime, but the fact that the controversy stirred up by his radical compositions of the 1920s was still remembered by leading Nazis a decade later. The fact that his wife was half-Jewish had not helped his cause. An earlier collaboration with Bertolt Brecht was still held against him, as was his work with a number of Jewish artists over the years. All of this made it easy for Rosenberg and his supporters to use him as a means of trying to loosen Goebbels’s grip on music and the arts. They succeeded in this instance, but on the wider front of cultural politics they met with little success. By 1939 Rosenberg had all but abandoned his interest in the cultural scene, and had turned to foreign policy instead.213

  III

  If it was by no means easy for the Nazis to decide what kinds of music they did not like, and what kinds of conductors and composers they did not want, it was even more difficult reaching any kind of consistent policy on what kind of music they did wish to encourage. No real body of genuinely Nazi music emerged under the Third Reich, for all the theorizing of Nazi musicologists.214 Those composers who flourished did so partly because they were not Jewish, partly because they made their style more accessible than it might otherwise have been, and partly because they turned to themes and topics that were acceptable to the regime, such as peasant life or national heroes. But it is impossible to bring the music they actually wrote down to any obvious common denominator. Moreover, few if any of them remained completely immune to the influence of the modernist style the Nazis so abhorred. Werner Egk, for example, wrote in a distinctly Stravinskyan mode, often putting the Bavarian folk tunes he employed into a context of spiky dissonance. Egk’s opera The Magic Fiddle, first performed in 1935, won the plaudits of the regime, however, for its portrayal of the charm and tranquillity of peasant life. Its plot centred on the evil machinations of a villain, Guldensack (Money-bags), who in the context of the Third Reich was very obviously a Jew. The rumblings of a few critics from the Rosenberg camp were quickly subdued, and Egk cemented his triumph by declaring that no piece of German music should be so complicated that it could not be performed at a Nazi Party rally. Egk’s next opera, Peer Gynt, also featured a quasi-Jewish villain, or rather villains, in the form of deformed and degenerate trolls, a somewhat loose interpretation of Ibsen’s original play; Hitler himself, on attending a performance, which included not only Egk’s usual Stravinskyan dissonances but also tango music and even a hint of jazz, was none the less so taken with the performance that he hailed Egk afterwards as a worthy successor to Richard Wagner.215

  Stravinsky’s influence was also to be found in the music of Carl Orff, who detested dissonance and had savagely attacked modernist composers such as Hindemith during the Weimar Republic. Orff first won the support of the regime through devising a large-scale project of musical education in the schools, and successfully defended it against obscurantist criticisms from some of Rosenberg’s supporters who disliked its use of unconventional musical instruments. Although the project relied heavily on folk music, however, it was too complex and too ambitious to have much influence in the institutions for which it was designed, such as the Hitler Youth. Orff shot to real prominence with the first performance of his c
antata Carmina Burana in June 1937. Based on secular medieval poems, the cantata featured strong, simple rhythms and monodic singing over a strongly percussive accompaniment. Its primitivism, its use of often ribald verses and its preference in many parts for Latin over German, aroused the suspicion of conservative critics from the Rosenberg stable; but Orff had gained influential supporters through his educational activities and Rosenberg’s influence was on the wane. Carmina Burana, powerful and original, yet simple and easy to comprehend, was an immediate success and was performed all over Germany. His further compositions may never quite have matched this, but Orff’s income and reputation were now secure. If any one musical work of distinction composed under the Third Reich fitted the Nazi idea of culture, then Carmina Burana was surely that work: its crude tonality, its brutal, repetitious rhythms, its medieval texts and folksy tunes, its numbing, insistent pulse, its absence of anything to engage the mind, seemed to sweep away all the excrescences of modernity and intellectualism that Nazism so detested and take culture back to the supposed primitive simplicities of the distant, peasant past.216

  In the end, however, compositions such as Carmina Burana, for all their popularity, took second place in the musical pantheon to the work of the great composers of previous ages most admired by Hitler. Chief among these was Richard Wagner. Hitler had been a devotee of his operas since his youth in Linz and Vienna before the First World War. They filled his head with mythical pictures of a heroic Germanic past. Wagner was also the author of a notorious pamphlet attacking Jewry in Music. Yet the composer’s influence on Hitler has often been exaggerated. Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism, and there is no evidence that he actually read any of Wagner’s writings. He admired the composer’s gritty courage in adversity, but did not acknowledge any indebtedness to his ideas. If Wagner did have an influence on the Nazis, it was less direct, through the antisemitic doctrines of the circle that his widow Cosima gathered after his death, and through the mythical world portrayed in his operas. In this area at least, they inhabited the same cultural space, filled with mythic Germanic nationalism. Hitler’s devotion to Wagner and his music was obvious. Already in the 1920s he had become friendly with Wagner’s English daughter-in-law Winifred and her husband Siegfried Wagner, guardians of the composer’s shrine at the great opera house he had built in Bayreuth. They were staunch supporters of the far right. In the Third Reich they became something very like cultural royalty.217

  From 1933 onwards, Hitler attended the Bayreuth festival of Wagner’s music-dramas for a ten-day period every year. He poured money into the opera house, which he had subordinated directly to himself rather than to the Propaganda Ministry. He inaugurated monuments and memorials to Wagner, and tried to ensure packed houses at Wagner performances by instructing his underlings to make block bookings for their men. He even proposed rebuilding the opera house in a more grandiose style, and was only dissuaded by Winifred Wagner’s insistence that the unique acoustics of the existing building, purpose-designed by the composer for performances of his own work, could not be reproduced in a larger space. His interference in productions was frequent, but it was also erratic. Hitler’s personal patronage meant that neither Goebbels nor Rosenberg nor any of the other cultural politicians of the Third Reich could bring Bayreuth under their aegis. Paradoxically, therefore, Winifred Wagner and the managers of the Festival were granted an unusual degree of cultural autonomy. They were not even members of the Reich Theatre Chamber. They used their freedom, however, in a way that was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the Third Reich. The annual Bayreuth Festival became a Hitler festival, with Hitler greeting the audience from a balcony, his portrait on the frontispiece of the programme, Nazi propaganda in all the hotel rooms, and the streets and walkways surrounding the theatre bedecked with swastika flags.218

  Goebbels and other leading Nazis grumbled about Hitler’s passion for Wagner, which they thought rather eccentric. On Hitler’s insistence the Nuremberg Party Rally opened every year with a gala performance of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. In 1933 Hitler issued a thousand free tickets to Party officials, but when he entered his box he found the theatre almost empty; the Party men had all chosen to go off to drink the evening away in the town’s numerous beer-halls and cafés rather spend five hours listening to classical music. Furious, Hitler sent out patrols to haul them out of their drinking-dens, but even this could not fill the theatre. The next year was no better. Under strict orders to attend, many roughnecked Party officials could be seen dozing off during the interminable performance, waking up only at the end, to render rather half-hearted applause for an opera they had neither appreciated not understood. After this, Hitler gave up and the seats were sold to the public instead.219 Yet despite this lack of interest on the part of almost everyone in the Party leadership except Hitler himself, the influence of Wagner’s music was everywhere in the cultural scene. Journeymen composers churned out vast quantities of sub-Wagnerian sludge to order on any occasion when it was desired. Film, radio, newsreels were saturated with music of this kind. Over-exposure may have been one reason why Wagner actually became less popular with opera houses and the public during the Third Reich. Performances of his work declined from 1,837 in the 1932-3 opera season to 1,327 in 1938-9, while those of Verdi rose from 1,265 to 1,405 in 1937-8 and Puccini from 762 to 1,013 the following year. And while the list of the fifteen most popular operas in 1932-3, headed by Bizet’s Carmen, contained four works by Wagner, in third, fourth, fifth and sixth place respectively, the same list in 1938-9, headed this time by Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci, included only one, at number twelve.220 In the orchestral repertoire, the conventional late-Romantic music of the curmudgeonly, conservative and deeply antisemitic Hans Pfitzner replaced that of the second most frequently performed twentieth-century composer after Richard Strauss, the now-banned Gustav Mahler, after 1933. At the same time, performances of foreign composers such as Sibelius, Debussy and Respighi continued alongside growing numbers of such now forgotten luminaries of the Nazi musical pantheon as Paul Graener and Max Trapp. In all of this, there was an obvious series of compromises between the political and racial imperatives of the regime, the continued, basically conservative taste of the musical public and the commercial requirements of keeping concert halls and opera houses afloat.221

  Control over classical concerts and operas was relatively easy. But what went on in people’s homes was more difficult to monitor. Musical culture ran very deep in Germany, and there was a long tradition of playing and singing within the family or groups of friends. Doubtless, where there were no sharp-eared neighbours or Block Wardens listening, people still continued to play Mendelssohn’s much-loved Songs without Words on their piano at home despite their condemnation in the Nazi press as ‘prattling chatter’.222 Musical clubs, choirs, amateur chamber music groups and all the other small-scale, local institutions of Germany’s rich musical tradition had all been Nazified in 1933, but even so, small groups of people could gather in private to play and listen to whatever chamber music they wanted, provided they were careful enough about whom they invited. Pre-censorship of sheet music by the Reich Chamber of Music only covered new work, after all. Playing Mendelssohn at home was hardly an act of resistance to the regime, and did not in any case constitute an offence against the law.223 Even in public, however, there was at least some latitude. The Reich Music Censorship Office’s list of banned works mainly covered jazz, and even in its second edition, published on 1 September 1939, it contained only fifty-four entries.224

  Music is the most abstract of the arts, and therefore the most difficult to monitor and control under a dictatorship. The cultural arbiters of the Third Reich thought they knew what they wanted: ideological conformity in opera and song, tonal simplicity and the absence of dissonance in music where there were no words to betray the writer’s ideological leanings. According to their cultural ideology, the spirit of tonality and simplicity was Aryan, that of atonality and complexity
Jewish. Yet firing and banning Jewish musicians and composers had no effect on musical life apart from depriving it of many of its most distinguished and exciting figures. For what, in the end, was tonal music, what was dissonance? Technical definitions got nowhere, since all composers since before the days of Bach and Mozart have made liberal use of dissonance in the technical sense. Of course the extremes of atonality, above all the twelve-tone method developed by Arnold Schönberg and his pupils, were anathema; and tonal Romanticism such as that purveyed by Hans Pfitzner or Richard Strauss was unlikely to raise any objections. But most composers worked in the area between these two extremes. They had to tread a fine line between acceptance and rejection, often dependent on the patronage of powerful figures in the Party, either at national or local level, to ward off criticism from others. In this way, figures like Paul Hindemith or Werner Egk became to some extent pawns in the power-games of Goebbels, Rosenberg and the other Nazi satraps. And where a composer or musician overstepped the mark and entered into the political realm, even Goebbels’s sympathy for modernity could not save him.225

  As in other areas of German culture, Goebbels in particular was conscious that music too could provide people with a refuge from the turmoil of everyday life. Just as he encouraged entertainment films and light music on the radio, so too he realized that performances of well-loved classical music could soothe and distract, and help people reconcile themselves to living in the Third Reich. Audiences for their part may, as many people claimed, have found in Furtwängler’s concerts a source of alternative values to those propagated by the Nazis, but if this was indeed the case, then those values remained locked in their private souls, and it was indeed difficult, given music’s abstraction from the real world, to see how it could have been otherwise. Music, in any case, like the other arts, had in Goebbels’s view to be a sphere of relative autonomy for the creative artist. It could be purged and censored, and was, but it also had to be encouraged and supported, and in the main, the musicians had to run their own show; the state certainly was not competent to do it for them. The Propaganda Ministry was keen to nurture musicians through competitions, subsidies and improved arrangements for royalties. In March 1938 a thorough reorganization of salaries and pensions helped bring new musicians into a profession that had suffered financially in the economic depression. So many musicians had left the country, or been purged, or quit the profession, that a shortage was now threatening, exacerbated by the expansion of big organizations like the army, the SS, and the Labour Front, with their growing employment of military bands and orchestras. All of this continued to ensure the vitality of musical life in Germany, and great orchestras continued to perform great music under the baton of great conductors, although the range of music performed, and the number of prominent conductors who directed it, were both smaller than before 1933. Yet many considered that there were no new great composers. Strauss himself took this view. If anything, it even increased his already unshakeable sense of his own importance as the heir of the great tradition of German composers. ‘I am the last mountain of a large mountain range,’ he said: ‘After me come the flatlands.’226