by Peter Watson
One interesting difference between art and music was that although paintings could not be “Aryanized,” there were attempts to make this happen with music. The regime invited contemporary composers to produce replacements for Mendelssohn’s ever-popular music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (forty-four scores were produced, though none really caught on). Both Schubert and Schumann had set to music poems by Heine, who was Jewish, and there was widespread debate about the propriety of performing such “hybrid” creations. In the case of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Le Nozze di Figaro, and Don Giovanni, in which the librettos had been written by the baptized Jew Lorenzo Da Ponte and translated into German by the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi, the NSKG commissioned Siegfried Anheisser to provide a new “Aryan” retranslation. By 1938 his translations had been adopted in 76 of Germany’s 85 opera houses.31 There were several other examples of this procedure.
It wasn’t only Jews who were targets. The contemporary music festival at Baden-Baden was stopped, and the experimental Kroll Opera in Berlin abolished in 1931, even before the Nazis came to power, but partly thanks to their agitation.*32 Early in 1933 Nazi protests against contemporary music were stepped up, together with a ban on the broadcasting of jazz, viewed as a degenerate example of “Negro culture.”† Censorship was temporarily relaxed in 1935–36, ahead of the Berlin Olympics, when a larger than usual number of foreigners—especially Americans—were in Germany, but was resumed soon afterward. An Entarte Musik exhibition was held in Düsseldorf in May 1938, the brainchild of Adolf Ziegler, a major feature of which was photographs of composers—Schoenberg, Hindemith, Webern—who were considered to have a destructive influence on German music. There were six booths where, at the touch of a button, visitors could hear examples of Hindemith, Weill, Ernst Krenek, and others.33
The dissonant music of Richard Strauss escaped censure but not that of Schoenberg’s disciples Webern and Berg. Lulu was performed in Berlin in November 1934 and provoked such a scandal that no other work by Berg was ever performed in the Third Reich. The attitudes of the Nazis toward Paul Hindemith had been hostile even before 1933, not just because of his modernist music but because of his links to Bertolt Brecht. But, as professor of composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik since 1927, he occupied a high profile position in which he exerted an influence over a whole generation of composers, and not just German ones. As an “Aryan” and Germany’s next most prominent composer after Strauss, he had influence, the more so when Strauss nominated him to be part of the inner council of the RMK in November 1933. In February 1934, a concert to unveil the RMK was held, billed as “The first concert in the Reich,” featuring works by Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, Siegmund von Hausegger, and Hindemith, who conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of his Concert for Strings and Wind, originally written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1930. A month later Furtwängler conducted the same Berlin orchestra in the first performance of Hindemith’s new work, Mathis der Maler. This was well received, and former critics believed he had purged himself of the “ugly stains of the past.” Mathis was quickly performed all over Germany.
Then denunciations started appearing, accusing him of “cultural bolshevism,” of identification with the Jews, and “atonality.” A timely invitation came from the Turkish government to establish a music school in Istanbul, and Hindemith accepted.34
In the first few months of taking office, forty-nine out of Germany’s eighty-five opera houses had seen a change of senior personnel. Despite their replacement by administrators and musicians more amenable to the National Socialists, Erik Levi reports that the high standards of performance that had been maintained before 1933 were sustained.35 Furthermore, the number of musicians contracted to German theaters increased as follows:
SEASON: 1932–33
SINGERS: 1,859
CHORUS: 2,955
ORCHESTRA: 4,889
SEASON: 1937–38
SINGERS: 2,145
CHORUS: 3,238
ORCHESTRA: 5,577
Even after the outbreak of war, says Levi, opera activity continued to be intensive, many theaters maintaining a “substantial” repertoire. The Nazis poured vast resources into Bayreuth, offering cheap tickets to armaments workers and war veterans.36 German opera companies visited occupied territories until 1942.
Contemporary composers who declared support for the regime were assiduously promoted. Max von Schillings’s operas received 117 performances in the 1933–34 season, compared with 48 and 24 in the previous two seasons. Much the same happened with Hans Pfitzner, whose performances increased from 46 in 1931–32 to 130 in 1933–34.37 There was also a posthumous renaissance of operas by Siegfried Wagner, Richard’s son, who had died in 1930 after composing even more operas than his father. At the same time, contemporary operas by foreign composers were discouraged. According to Levi, 170 or so new German operas were performed in the Third Reich. Once the war had started, the number of new operas reaching the German stage showed no reduction until the 1943–44 season, with between sixteen and twenty premieres a year. Wagner actually suffered a decline in popularity throughout the 1930s, performances dropping from 1,837 in 1932–33 to 1,154 in 1939–40, while those of Verdi and Puccini rose.38
There were 181 permanent orchestras working in Germany in 1940, according to the RMK. From the time the Nazis came to power, and if we ignore the Jewish experience, orchestral musicians in Germany experienced an upturn in their fortunes. Standards remained just as high as in the Weimar period, this having to do with both an outstanding generation of conductors (Furtwängler, Erich Kleiber, Bruno Walter, Karl Böhm, Otto Klemperer, Hans Knappertsbusch, Hermann Scherchen, many of whom had to leave Germany later) and the growth of commercial recording firms, which helped establish German orchestras as preeminent throughout Europe.39
The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra fought hard to keep its Jewish instrumentalists, even giving them their own solo pieces during the early months of the new regime. Furtwängler fought in their corner too, arguing at least to begin with that race had nothing to do with ability. As we have seen, however, the orchestra eventually had to succumb, driven into near bankruptcy by Goebbels. Even so, the orchestra’s level of quality was maintained, conductors from abroad were still invited, and tours all over Europe were made in the 1930s. Throughout the period, contemporary music accounted for about a third of the repertoire.40
THE BROWN SHIFT IN THEATER
Germany—and Berlin in particular—had been renowned in the Weimar years for the virility of its theater. Though Berlin theater held on to its strengths for a while, elsewhere in the country the decline was swift after the Nazis took power. Performances of Goethe and Schiller continued, but for the rest the content was soon reduced to light opera and the works of mainly now-forgotten playwrights, often performing modern plays about peasant themes—and in peasant dialect.41 Theater also underwent what was called a “braun shift”—all aspects being politicized, taking their color from the brown shirts of the Storm Troopers. Both Hitler and Goebbels believed, or said they believed, that it was the theater in the Weimar period that had abused German culture the most.
The first National Socialist premiere took place in 1927, in Cologne, with Hans Johnst’s Thomas Paine, about the nationalist American revolutionary, “forgotten by his country as he sits in a French Republican prison.” But by May 1933 the change that was to come was heralded. On the sixth of the month, as minister president of Prussia, Göring took personal control of state and city theaters and, two days later, Goebbels addressed a special meeting of producers at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin on “the tasks of the German theater.” He insisted that “outmoded art forms” would be eliminated in favor of the new Volk art—political, patriotic, and “consistent with the philosophy of the ruling party.”42 “German art of the next decade will be heroic; it will be like steel; it will be romantic, non-sentimental, factual; it will be national with great pathos and at once obligatory and binding,
or it will be nothing.” On August 21, 1933, Goebbels announced the creation of the office of Reichsdramaturg to advise his ministry on the theater, under Dr. Rainer Schlosser, a former critic. By then the new administration had given some hope to the theater profession (provided it kept in line) by supporting twelve new theaters (on to a total of 248 across the country).
The earliest chance the Nazis had to show off their taste was at the First National Socialist Theater Festival, held in Dresden from May 27 to June 3, 1934. The brainchild of the Propaganda Ministry (known then as the Promi), it was graced by Hitler himself, who decided to attend at the last minute. By this time, the theaters were more or less firmly under Goebbels’s control and he identified three Berlin houses in particular to be the showcase of his new policy, and new Intendants, or directors. These were Count Bernhard Solms for the Volksbühne (formerly associated with Piscator), Heinz Hilpert for the Deutsches Theater (Reinhardt), and Walter Brügmann for the Theater des Volkes (the former Grosses Schauspielhaus of Reinhardt). Ten days before the Dresden Festival, Goebbels announced the Unified Theater Law, which stipulated that all theaters—private and public—must abide by the Nazis’ racial and artistic aims, that theaters had only one obligation, to be “conscious of national responsibility” and that otherwise artistic freedom “will not be altered in any way.”43 Theaters were to be licensed.
One of the arguments Goebbels had with what he called the “modernist big-mouths” was that they often showed strife within Germany (Hauptmann’s The Weavers, for instance) and this would no longer be tolerated. The program of the Dresden Festival therefore included works by Kleist, Schiller, Ibsen/Eckart (Peer Gynt), Goethe, and Shakespeare. It was in effect a “safe” performance, not ramming propaganda down people’s throats too hard.
The Berlin Grosses Schauspielhaus itself, as a building, was huge and had a varied history, being at one stage the home of a circus, at another the venue where Robert Koch’s international congress dealing with tuberculosis had been held in 1890, and at another where the workers congregated on hearing of the death of Lenin in 1924.44 Its great days were inaugurated with the arrival of Max Reinhardt (see Chapter 28), in whose time the theater was equipped with a Kuppelhorizont (sky dome) for spectacular staging effects and a revolving floor. Financial difficulties forced Reinhardt to sell this theater even before Goebbels forced his hand with the others.
The very size of the theater was attractive to the Nazis. This “sense of massiveness” was always important for them as they attempted, one way or another, to create what Hofmannsthal had identified as “ceremonies of the whole” back in turn-of-the-century Vienna (see Chapter 26). In the Grosses Schauspielhaus, productions were always grand, massive, achieving their effects by enormous choruses, hundreds of musicians, vast troops of dancers, real cocks crowing, and real dogs barking. The aim, says Yvonne Shaffer, was to elevate and unite the audience “in a mystical union,” but from 1936 to 1940 the Grosses Schauspielhaus, now renamed the Theater des Volkes, became the home of operetta. It was argued that operetta could “lead the uninitiated to an appreciation of opera.” Believing that the contentment of the workers was “a task of military importance,” the point of operetta was that it returned audiences to life as it was in the good old days, which the Nazis promised to bring back.45
The most imaginative and versatile actor/director of those times was Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963), who could sing and dance as well as act, who had worked all over the country with his wife, Erika Mann, her brother Klaus (children of Thomas), and Pamela Wedekind (daughter of Frank) and had a famous cabaret, the “Review of Four.”46 Gründgens, though married, was a homosexual, but this did not deter Göring from appointing him Intendant at the Schauspielhaus am Gendarmenmarkt and instructing him to attract the biggest names. Gründgens obliged, surrounding himself with actors like Werner Krauss, Emil Jannings, and Emmy Sonnemann (who Göring was courting just then). Most importantly, Gründgens employed Jürgen Fehling (1885–1968), who had been a big name in Weimar times, directing plays by several playwrights the Nazis had banned, though he also directed plays by those they approved.
By no means an ideal director from the Nazis’ point of view, Fehling’s ability protected him. Together with Heinz Hilpert (1890–1967), who had a long association with Reinhardt in many modernist Weimar productions, they managed to keep legitimate theater unpolitical and maintain its excellence. These men maintained some integrity, mainly by producing only German classics and Shakespeare, and keeping works by playwrights who adapted to the Nazis, such as the Austrian, Richard Billinger, winner of the 1932 Kleist Prize. A major scandal was caused when Gründgens allowed Fehling to stage Richard III in 1937. Werner Krauss, as Gloucester, hobbled around the stage, with a clubfoot, “an apparent Goebbels take-off.” Equally bad, the murderers of Clarence appeared on stage “in brown shirts and jackboots, bearing a distinct similarity to Nazi storm troopers.” To cap it all, when Gloucester became king, “a phalanx of eight men in black uniforms accented with silver bijouterie accompanied him; their resemblance to Hitler’s SS was both immediate and frightening.”47
Göring, who saw the play, wanted Fehling dismissed, but Gründgens refused and, for once, the Reichsmarschall was defeated. But Fehling went on to direct Nazi plays. As elsewhere, didactic plays became obligatory and the classics were reinterpreted to support Nazi dogma. 48
35.
Scholarship in the Third Reich: “No Such Thing as Objectivity”
In the first two years after the Nazis took power, at least 1,600 scholars, some 32 percent of the total of 5,000 university teachers, were dismissed, on either political or racial grounds. By the end of 1938, Germany—including Austria—had lost 39 percent of its university teachers, with Berlin and Frankfurt hardest hit, closely followed by Heidelberg.1 The first years of the Third Reich comprised the era of the worst student radicalism, which often disrupted the classes of faculty members deemed undesirable but, as Steven Remy has shown in his study of Heidelberg, many faculty members silently acquiesced in the purges. Remy says that American intelligence reports compiled in 1945 identified fifteen Heidelberg professors as informants on their colleagues during the years of the Third Reich. There were protests but they were few and far between. Alfred Weber, the sociologist brother of Max Weber, resisted a plan to fly the swastika over public buildings, including his own institute, was pilloried in the local press for doing so, and forced to resign his position not long after.
Only a few academics joined the Nazi Party before Hitler actually took power, including the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Philipp Lenard, but once the Nazis were in office “the encomiums began.” In April 1933 the Association of German Universities issued a statement in support of the “new German Reich,” and in November 700 out of a total of some 2,000 full professors signed a document of support to “Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state.” Hundreds of professors now joined the party.2
Remy says that at Heidelberg there was a rash of publications in support of the National Socialists, most of them decrying Weimar as “weak,” “foreign,” and “un-German” and welcoming what many liked to call the “national revolution…that embodied a mixture of continuity with Germany’s past and the radical, youth-oriented element of the National Socialist ‘movement.’” The sociologist Arnold Bergstraesser blamed democracy for failing to produce “that social and political unity which is necessary in order to overcome a crisis like the world crisis of 1929,” arguing that one of the aims of National Socialism was to establish “a real unity between State and society.” The main idea now, he said, was “not to allow the existence of any sphere apart from the State.” When he attended conferences across the Channel, the theologian Martin Dibelius made it his business to spread before the British, “the wonder of German unity” and “the cleansing of moral life” taking place under the Nazis. 3
Jurists did what they could to offer legal justification for the new Nazi laws. In general their view was to advocate the importa
nce of “German common law” and to reject the concept of “individual rights protected by law.”4 Walter Jellinek (himself Jewish) praised the new Nazi laws for overcoming class, regional, and religious differences. “The individual…owes all his dignity of being human only to his subordination to the state.” In 1934 Jellinek argued that the political power concentrated in Hitler’s hands was no bad thing: “It must not be forgotten that a voluntary restriction of supreme power resides in the German word Führer, the ideological content of which can hardly be translated into a foreign language.”5
That so many established scholars were dismissed created boom conditions for younger, more compliant colleagues. Many of them, on the radical right, saw such advance as little more than their entitlement. The sociologist Carl Brinkmann, for example, now began opening his lectures with the words “finally, we can speak freely.” There also emerged a group of more senior figures who began to work on the shape of the universities under National Socialism. These included Ernst Krieck, Alfred Bäumler, Adolf Rein, Hans Freyer, and Martin Heidegger. Krieck, a professor of pedagogy and in 1933 rector of the University of Frankfurt, called for an overhaul of the university, a “levelling of its hierarchical structure” and the “total focus of its research and teaching on the ideological goals of the state.” Walter Gross, chief of the Office of Racial Politics, charged with “heightening ethnic consciousness,” worried that many scholars who claimed to endorse National Socialism actually withheld “inner support” by taking “refuge” in “apolitical” research projects.6 He also realized that biologists had failed to identify Jewish blood by physiological traits, which meant that a switch to cultural stereotypes was needed.
