[Zweite Fassung:]
The Musical Climate for Fascism in Germany
To many Americans who are used to thinking of Germany as the mother country of great music it appears as if Hitler and the barbarian Nazi dictatorship had destroyed, with one stroke, a flourishing musical culture. The brutality with which the Nazi regime clamped down on every unregimented musical expression and brought the entire musical life under complete control is appalling indeed. It would be naive, however, to assume that the indisputable destruction of German musical culture has been brought about solely by a kind of political invasion from outside, by mere force and violence. This culture underwent a severe crisis, economically no less than spiritually, before Hitler seized power. Many elements of the spirit of Fascism crystallized within the sphere of music proper, quite apart from any visible political pressure. Hitler was, in music as well as in many other respects, merely the final executor of tendencies that had developed within the womb of German society. Since we are not interested in a mere description or history of the fascist onslaught on culture, but rather want to learn from the German experience as much as we can in order to avoid a recrudescence of the evil in any other country, it may be good to have a look at some of those fascist tendencies within German music, and musical life, before Hitler. This may help us to understand better the musical climate of Fascism itself.
A more general remark may be pertinent at this point. There can be no doubt that Fascism, as soon as it has conquered, absorbs practically all intellectual trends which are not definitely and articulately opposed to it, even the most contradictory ones. The philosophies of Fichte as well as of his modern antipode Klages, the poetry of populists, such as Gerhart Hauptmann and Hamsun, as well as of esoterics, such as George and Rudolf Alexander Schröder, political theories of hierarchical conservatism and of revolutionary activism have been equally swallowed by totalitarian ideology, undergoing on the way changes which often, as for example with the German mystic Meister Eckhardt, amounted to mutilation and complete falsification. It may thus be said that it is no good looking for fascist symptoms in pre-Hitler culture since no element of that culture was safe from being taken over by the usurper. This objection, however, is too sweeping. One can very well differentiate between artistic and philosophical phenomena which tend towards Fascism by themselves, and others which were claimed by the Nazis more or less arbitrarily, mainly on account of their prestige value. Moreover, one can clearly distinguish between names to which the Nazis did only lip service, such as Goethe and Beethoven, and others who represent ideas which are the lifeblood of the fascist movement, mostly comparatively obscure figures, such as Ernst Moritz Arndt and Paul de Lagarde.
My observations are going to be made with an eye on these reflections. The first name that comes to everybody's mind in connection with pre-Hitler musical Fascism is that of Richard Wagner. It may be good to recollect that there is an immediate link between him and official Nazi ideology. Wagner's philosophical pupil and son-in-law, the Germanized Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was one of the first writers who combined aggressive pan-Germanism, racism, the belief in the superiority of German culture and militant anti-Semitism. The Nazi bogus philosopher Alfred Rosenberg has confessedly borrowed most of his ideas from Chamberlain's Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts and the latter had the blessing of Wagner himself and later of the Bayreuth circle which turned Nazi at an early date. Not only can we discover many elements of rubber-stamped Nazi doctrine in Wagner's theoretical writings but we can also spot them, which is more important, throughout Wagner's works in more or less flimsy allegorical disguise. The whole plot of Wagner's Ring suggests some kind of a gigantic frameup, with Siegfried as an innocent and lovable Teutonic hero who, just by chance, conquers the world and ultimately falls victim to the Jewish conspiracy of the dwarfs and those who trust their counsel. Incidentally, it is ironical enough that even the downfall of Hitler is presaged in this metaphysical master plan. Apart from such some-what crude though legitimate interpretations I should go so far as to venture that a minute musical analysis of Wagner's works yields insight into the fascist nature of his very way of composing, in a very concrete and tangible sense. It is impossible, however, to elaborate this thesis in the present paper.
Yet I should not overrate the importance of Wagner as a formative element of Fascism. Apart from the fact that his work contains also forces entirely antagonistic to those which I mentioned his actual influence in Germany was definitely on the decline. It helped to prepare the climate for Fascism with the generation of our parents and has doubtless soaked through innumerable channels into the unconscious of most Germans. However, Wagner's work itself had largely ceased to be a living force. This holds for the musicians as well as for the public. Since 1910 at the latest there started a revolt of all composers of any independence and talent against Wagnerianism and all it entailed. One may easily regard anti-Wagnerianism as the common denominator of all the different schools that have sprung into existence since the beginning of this century. Concomitantly, Wagnerian philosophy lost its hold on the artists. But what happened with the audience is perhaps even more significant. The lack of knowledge of the Wagnerian work among the younger generation in Germany was simply astonishing. The spiritual demands of the Weltanschauungsmusik, the exacting length of the Musikdrama, the spirit of high fallutin' symbolism so antagonistic to the positivistic matter-of-factness spreading over the youth of the whole world – all this helped to bring Wagner into almost complete oblivion. His old Germans became associated with the idea of the »beaver«. I can give you an example which, at that time, struck me as most characteristic. In the winter term 1932/33, immediately before Hitler took over, I had to conduct at Frankfurt University a seminar on Hanslick's treatise Vom musikalisch Schönen, on the musically beautiful, which is essentially a defense of musical formalism against the doctrines of Wagner and the programmatic school. Although the seminar was focused on philosophical issues, the participants, about thirty, were mostly musicologists. In the first meeting I tried to ascertain to what extent they were familiar with Wagner's works, acquaintance with which is the prerequisite for any understanding of Hanslick's polemics. Since I did not satisfy myself with vague statements about their knowing this or that Musikdrama, I asked who was capable of writing the Siegfried motif, the most famous of all Wagnerian leitmotifs, on the black-board. Nobody was.
This little event is symptomatic not only of the oblivion into which Wagner had fallen but of a much broader issue. You may call it the musical decultivation of German middle classes. Of course, I do not want to speak in quantitative terms here. We have no means of measuring statistically musical culture during the nineteenth century and now, and even if we could I don't think the result would amount to much. The millions of people who have been brought into some kind of contact with music by the means of modern technical communication, particularly the radio, have altered the picture so completely that no straightforward comparison would make much sense. By speaking about the decultivation of the middle classes I mean something different. During the nineteenth century there existed certain groups who, without being professional musicians, were in real contact with music, were moved by the ideas expressed by music and were capable of a subtle and discriminating understanding. The attitude of writers, such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche towards music were not understandable without the existence of such a nucleus of musically truly cultured non-musicians. This nucleus has disappeared. Musical knowledge and understanding has become the privilege of experts and professionals. I cannot go into the reasons for this process which is deeply connected with certain changes undergone by the whole German middle class which, on the basis of its own material interests, was more and more alienated from the same culture which their fathers and grandfathers had brought about. At any rate, it is this decultivation, this loss of any life relationship with what is supposed to be the tradition of great German music that has contributed more to the fascist climate than the allegiance to even a nationalistic and chauvinistic author, such as Richard Wagner. This is hardly exaggerated. For the idea of humanism, the true counter-tendency against violent nationalism throughout modern history was in Germany inseparably bound up with the taking serious of music. One may say that the cultural impact of music in Germany was the equivalent of the humanistic tradition in great French literature. To be sure, Beethoven's greatness is not explained, as our appreciation orators want us to believe, by the fact that he composed Fidelio, the opera which glorifies the powers of humanism in their struggle against tyranny, or the IX. Symphony which expresses the promise of joy to all and every human being without any exception to race or creed. The greatness of Beethoven has to be understood in musical concepts first. Yet, the fact that he was bound up with humanistic philosophy permeates his whole work and determines even the most subtle details of his musicianship. The German boy of our era who has no longer heard, as his father might have, the Kreutzer Sonata played by some friends of his parents when he is supposed to go to bed does not merely miss a piece of erudition or information. The fact that he has never been swept away emotionally by the tragic forces of this music bereaves him somehow of one of the strengest experiences of the humane. It is this lack of experience, of the imagery of real art, partly substituted by the ready-made stereotypes of the amusement industry, which is at least one of the formative elements of that cynicism which has finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven's own people, into Hitler's own people. Musical culture in Germany had not died away, it survived with the artists and the level of performance was extraordinarily high. But it had largely become a museum piece or an export article, somehow reminiscent of the cultural function of Renaissance architecture in today's Italy. The tie between the idea of humanism, of music as an art, and social reality was definitely broken. This is the most essential characteristic of the musical climate for Fascism in pre-Hitler Germany.
This has been reflected in musical production. If we take a quick glance at the most successful German post-Wagnerian composer – as a matter of fact the only one whose fame is internationally established –, Richard Strauss, there is clear evidence that the link with German humanism, with philosophy in the sense of a basic relationship to truth, has been severed. The fact that Richard Strauss at one time attempted to translate a philosophical work, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, into program music, is no proof to the contrary. One rather may say that this philosophy, as well as the estheticism of Oscar Wilde or the religious symbolism of the Frau ohne Schatten, the Rococo of the Rosenkavalier, or the intimacy of the private life of the modern upper middle class, have been put on exhibition by Strauss in a gigantic sale of all cultural goods. They first have become neutralized, have lost any intrinsic seriousness they ever may have possessed and are then transformed into consumer goods which are enjoyed as stimuli without being related to any ideas transcending the comfort offered by the world as it is. The only spiritual contents that remains is a kind of cult of the élan vital, of a spirit of success, recklessness, and expansionism which fits only too well with imperialist Germany from Emperor Wilhelm to Hitler. If complete cynicism and relativism are among the foremost characteristics of Fascism, these characteristics come clearly to the fore in an author who is apparently so faithful a child of the liberal era as Richard Strauss. To be sure, his broadmindedness is quite irreconcilable with the fanaticism of the Nazi movement, and yet, it is not an accident that he compromised with Hitler.
It is his spirit of hedonistic complacency and shallow showmanship against which everything rebelled that was productive and responsible in German musicianship. But it is also this very rebellion by which the truly great music which Germany has produced during this century, and of which the life work of Arnold Schoenberg is representative, became antagonistic to the audience and to the whole sphere of commercialized musical life, of the official German Musikleben. It has often been alleged, and also repeated in this country that it was a kind of guilt or an expression of snobbishness and obsolete l'art pour l'art ideas that the real musical avantgarde in Germany lost more and more its touch with the audience, so that the work of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern never became familiar to the non-musicians to any extent comparable with Wagner or even Strauss. Whereas the fact as such cannot be denied, I do not think that the blame is justified. It is just this opposition to the conformism of a public to whom music meant nothing more than distraction and entertainment which defended the humanistic tradition of German music against its decay. It is my thesis – which again I cannot expand – that the avantgarde represented the true societal interest against blindness, spite, and conventionalism of the actual audience. The discord which became the symbol of so-called Kulturbolschewismus and which is the conspicuous identification mark of the musical avantgarde, the supposed spirit of negativism and destruction, kept faith to Beethoven's humanism by expressing all the sufferings, the anguish, the fear of the crisis under which we live, long before this crisis actually started, instead of covering it up by idle comfort. It thus has maintained the link between music and philosophical truth. This does not only refer to the expressive sincerity of artists, such as Schoenberg, but also to their purely musical qualities, their severe and undisguised construction shunning all ornamentation, embellishment, everything which is not strictly necessary. We know today how deeply the often denounced subjectivism of the so-called atonal avantgarde was bound up from the beginning with functionalism.
Yet it is the very aloofness and non-conformity of this music which did not only keep it away from the market, but also created a kind of resentment which belongs to the most significant phenomena of the German musical climate for Fascism. Only those who know to what extent artistic and especially musical questions are involved with political issues throughout German cultural life can fully understand the emotional role played by the hatred against the music of the avantgarde within all reactionary and repressive groups of German society. Fascist cynicism never confessed itself openly as such. It was always cloaked by a net of highly conventional social, moral, and esthetic values which nobody took quite seriously. The more they practised anarchy, lawlessness, and cruelty in reality, the more they professed their belief in traditional orderliness in every respect. The musical avantgarde, on the other hand, disavowed by all of its works, by the subject matters chosen no less than by the musical structures themselves, these conventionalized ideas of beauty, harmony, nobleness, heroism, discipline and what not. Just because the Nazis and their fellow travellers never could fully believe in those clicés, or rather in the realization of the true meaning of such values within their own reality they felt an almost maniacal hatred against anything that could remind them of the spuriousness of their own faith. The discords of the musical ars nova were not simply disliked, nor does the explanation suffice that the highly complex compositions of the avantgarde composers were not properly understood. One may say that in a sense they were understood only too well and therefore provoked a fury among the listeners which is utterly disproportionate to the role played by this music in public life and which proves rather the bad conscience of the infuriated than any intrinsic defect of the objects of their resentment.
This resentment as well as the musical decultivation of the German middle classes, and certain ill-defined collectivistic tendencies of the pre-fascist era found their quasi-positive expression in the so-called musical folk and youth movement. During the Third Reich this movement came into a certain antagonism with the party and seems to have been abolished or absorbed by the Hitler Youth. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this movement, represented by people, such as the notorious Fritz Joede, had a strong affinity to the spirit of Fascism. I do not want to stress such obvious aspects as the connection between this musical collectivism and the fascist folk ideology, a connection which is based upon the fact that the idea of collectivity is made a fetish, glorified as such, without any reference to any concrete social content. But there are less obvious features to which I should like to draw your attention. There is a strong repressive trend throughout this musical collectivism, a hatred against the individual, the supposedly refined and sophisticated which is an expression of envy of those whose individuality could not truly develop, rather than the desire for a true solidarity of men which would presuppose those very individual qualities which are taboo to the agitators of musical collectivism. There is, moreover, the wish for barbarian simplicity at any price, the contempt for the métier, the unwillingness to learn anything – a kind of glorification of the supposedly plain, average man which may be transformed into a weapon against any minority which does not conform to his standards. There is, furthermore, the display of an aggressive spirit of community as an end in itself, played up artificially so as not to allow any questioning of its real meaning. This last element is perhaps the most important one. It bears witness to the manipulated, calculated nature of this supposed folk music. The more it pretends to be the expression of »we the people«, the more certain we may be that it is actually dictated by very particularistic clique interests, intolerant, aggressive and greedy for power. The Weimar Republic was a particularly fertile breeding ground for such pseudo-democratic trends which turned very easily into their opposite. Whoever has gone through the German experience becomes suspicious when he meets with any kind of organized folk art which is conscious of its own folksy character.
I may briefly summarize. We have mentioned, as indicative of a fascist musical climate in Germany before Hitler, the following phenomena which of course gain their true meaning only in a much broader societal context.
(1) The direct and indirect influence of Wagner
(2) The subsequent musical decultivation of the German middle classes
(3) The severing of the link between music and humanistic tradition as exemplified by Richard Strauss
(4) The spitefulness and hatred directed against the serious attempts of the musical avantgarde
(5) The artificial creation of a so-called folk art by order.
As to the musical climate during the Third Reich itself, I shall confine myself to some very few remarks. We know more about the measures taken by the Nazis than about their actual effect upon the population as a whole. My own experience with music after 1933 in Germany is much too limited as to allow me to give a comprehensive picture. Dr. Rubsamen has pointed out some of the later developments. The following observations, however, may be made:
(1) Musical life in Nazi Germany became above all largely conventionalized. It would be erroneous to assume that there ever sprung into life a specific Nazi musical culture. Any attempts to create it by order were limited to the most fanatic groups of the Nazi movement and never got hold of the bulk of the population, just as official Nazi poetry never became really popular. What actually happened was rather an exaltation of everything established, and particularly, of everything internationally recognized. So-called big shots, supposedly acceptable to everyone, such as Furtwängler, Gieseking, or Backhaus were made the most of. Moreover, a number of older second-rate composers, such as Paul Graener who were full of resentment because they were never taken too seriously by competent musicians, felt that their hour had struck and joined the Nazi movement, in order to get a break. None of their works, however, met with any considerable success.
(2) As to the production of the younger generation, of more or less fervent believers in the Nazi ideology: a number of new names appeared but what they actually achieved largely amounted to a feeble and diluted imitation of some of the better known composers of the Weimar era, particularly of those who had exercised a certain appeal to larger audiences, such as Hindemith or Kurt Weill. The latter's non-Aryan descent was no obstacle to one of the most successful Nazi opera composers, Mr. Wagner-Régeny, who copied Weill's style with all his mannerisms almost entirely.
(3) The most important characteristic of musical life under Hitler seems to me a complete stagnation, a »freezing« of all musical styles of composing and performing and of all critical standards, comparable to the freezing of wages under Hitler. Throughout cultural life the Nazis developed a kind of double-edged policy. On the one hand, they raged against modernism and Kulturbolschewismus, on the other hand, they disavowed fellow travellers and all those who tried to coordinate themselves quickly to the catch words of the Nazi ideology. Thus the compliant musicians, and above all the composers, were left somewhat confused and had to tread the mark. Some of them tried to get away with a mixture of popular folk art and techniques derived from neo-classicism. Of course, some talents of the first order, such as Winfried Zillig and Ludwig Zenk, remained in Germany and an opera of Zillig's was actually performed. But these authors were much too deeply involved with modernistic movements to make any headway. They, as well as an older master such as Anton Webern, went artistically underground. It remains to be seen whether they succeeded in salvaging any elements of genuine modern composing. I should like to mention as a curiosity that an elderly Nazi composer, a particularly bad one, Paul Klenau, even tried to adapt the twelve-tone-technique to his trash. The musical stagnation as well as that of art as a whole did not remain unnoticed by the more intelligent Nazis and even Herr Rosenberg who generally had to take an attitude of official optimism once suggested the idea that there was no time for great artistic production and that the energies formerly invested in art were now properly absorbed by technical and military ventures. Consequently, the restrictions put upon composing were somewhat lifted in order to raise the artistic standards. As soon, however, as the party allowed any bolder work to make its public appearance, the official Nazi critics spoke threateningly of Kulturbolschewismus. The atmosphere of insecurity thus created purposely must have exercised a paralysing effect. The best a German composer could hope for was escape into what has properly been called innere Emigration, internal emigration.
Whereas the tradition of old musical culture had evaporated and advanced trends had been eliminated at the surface, the Nazis failed completely in building up even a façade of a musical culture of their own. The same people who had always blamed intellectual cliques for modernism in music remained musically a clique whose folk ideas proved to be even more distant from the life of the people than advanced modern music. Gradually there developed a musical vacuum. Paradoxical as it sounds, the Germans were more willing to fight Hitler's battles than to listen to the operas and symphonies of his lackeys. When the war catastrophe put an end to the remnants of public German musical life, it merely executed a judgment that was silently spoken since the Hitler gang had established its dictatorship over culture.