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HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES Music and Nazism; Art under Tyranny, 1933-1945. Edited by Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Ricthmüller. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2003. [328 p. ISBN 3-89007-516-9. DM 49.80.] Music examples, illustrations, index.
In 1963 Joseph Wulf published Musik im dritten Reich (Gütersloh: Sigbert Mohn Verlag, 1963), one of a series of documentary studies that examined the mechanisms and effects of twelve years of National Socialism in Germany (other volumes treated art, literature and poetry, theater and film, the press and radio). These books were an irritating thorn in the side of a postwar Germany little interested in revisiting its Nazi past. Too many collaborators were still alive, active, and in positions of authority to encourage a full accounting. BuI with the changing of the generational guard over the last quarter century, the subject of cultural life in Nazi Germany has at last taken its place as an established field of research. This development is part of a general process of revisionism that includes holocaust and exile studies, as well as the effort to broaden our understanding of twentieth-century modernism to include a range of movements and figures relegated to the margins. But whereas these latter areas of research are largely concerned with victims and disruption, exploration of German cultural life under National Socialism must also confront a once self-satisfied record of continuity, an aggressive illusion of normalcy that for twelve years spanned an ever-widening chasm of barbarity.
The essays of the present volume, collected from an international conference held at the Canadian Genire for German and European Studies at York University in Toronto in 1999, fall into three distinct, though overlapping categories dealing with ideology, individuals, and institutions. Every totalitarian system, whether political or religious, left leaning or right wing, attempts to use the arts for propagandistic ends, but it did not take the Nazis to seduce or coerce Germans into freighting music with ideological import. The German tradition of thinking about music-and instrumentalizing aesthetics-runs very deeply. After all, in "the land of poets and thinkers" (Das Land der Dichter und Denker) even the composer is called a Tondichter, or tone poet, suggesting to some Germans a degree of reflection that sets them apart from their Latin neighbors. In fact, Germans are no more or...