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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2021
This article explores the politics of performing Wagner outdoors, focusing on the Waldoper in Sopot, Poland, and its operations under the Third Reich. Festival literature suggests that the Reich combined climatic deterministic logic with established open-air theatrical practice to implicate experiencing Wagnerian sounds outdoors as inculcating völkisch character in Poles, positioning the festival within the Reich’s imperial mission. However, this vision from ‘on high’ was undermined by bureaucratic disorganization and inefficiency, much like other Nazi artistic projects. The article concludes with a discussion of the post-war afterlives of the Waldoper and its attendant mythologies.
I wish to thank James Q. Davies, Gundula Kreuzer and Mary Ann Smart for reading and offering stimulating feedback on earlier drafts of this essay; the archivists and librarians at the Muzeum Sopotu and the Freie Universität Berlin for providing archival documents essential to this research; and Freya Jarman and two anonymous readers for their insightful suggestions and reviews. An earlier version of this article was awarded the 2018 Ingolf Dahl Memorial Prize from the American Musicological Society’s Northern California and Pacific Southwest chapters, and its completion was facilitated by the American Musicological Society’s Eugene K. Wolf Grant. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
1 ‘Der Kanzler ist auf dem Danziger Flugplatz gelandet!’; ‘Hitler kommt zur Waldoper! Der Führer besucht heute abend die Waldoper!’; ‘halb nichts’; ‘Das Gerücht war einmal da und wurde geglaubt. Ja, es span sich fort und nahm ganz bestimmte Formen an.’ Meyer, Friedrich Albert, ‘Als der Führer in der Waldoper erwartet wurde’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper: Ein Weg zum neuen deutschen Theater, ed. Meyer (Berlin: Schlieffen, 1934), 35–8Google Scholar (p. 35). It is not clear who Meyer was or why he was editing collections of essays on the Waldoper.
2 Meyer, Friedrich Albert, Die Zoppoter Waldoper: Ein kleiner Führer für die reichswichtige Festspielstätte (Sopot: Verlag Zoppoter Waldoper, 1939)Google Scholar. For transcripts of the contents pages of both of Meyer’s volumes, see Appendix.
3 ‘Die deutsche kulturelle Wiedergeburt’; ‘reichswichtige Festspielstätte’. ‘Geleitworte’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, ed. Meyer (1934), 7–12 (p. 7). For more on Goebbels’s terminology, see Theater im ‘Dritten Reich’, ed. Thomas Eicher, Barbara Panse and Henning Rischbieter (Berlin: Kallmeyer, 2000), and Theatre under the Nazis, ed. John London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
4 Potter, Pamela M., ‘The Arts in Nazi Germany: A Silent Debate’, Contemporary European History, 15 (2006), 585–99 (p. 589)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On this subject, see also Potter, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016).
5 Hulme, Mike, ‘Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism’, Osiris, 26 (2011), 245–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an overview of climatic determinism, see Fleming, James, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Behringer, Wolfgang, A Cultural History of Climate, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2010)Google Scholar; and on German environmental determinism in particular, see Smith, Kimberly A., Between Ruin and Renewal: Egon Schiele’s Landscapes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 120–2Google Scholar.
6 Clinefelter, Joan, Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 118 Google Scholar. Quoted in Potter, ‘The Arts in Nazi Germany’, 590.
7 Ellis, Katherine, ‘Open-Air Opera and Southern French Difference at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, and Suzanne Aspden, ‘Pastoral Retreats: Playing at Arcadia in Modern Britain’, Operatic Geographies: The Place of Opera and the Opera House, ed. Aspden, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 178–94 and 195–212Google Scholar.
8 London, John, Introduction, Theatre under the Nazis, ed. London, 1–53 (p. 17)Google Scholar.
9 ‘Innere Bedürfnis und Wollen der deutschen Seele’; ‘das Menschliche in seiner ewigen Einheit mit Wiesengrund lebendiger Natur erleben läßt’. ‘Geleitworte’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, ed. Meyer (1934), 10. For expressions of similar sentiments, see ibid., 7–12, and Meyer, Die Zoppoter Waldoper (1939), 3–11.
10 ‘Eine nationale Kulturtat des deutsches Osten’; ‘Nimbus der Naturgegebenheit’; ‘stimmungsvolle Wandlung’; ‘Naturmusik’; ‘[eine] starke Einfluss auf die Erziehung des deutschen Menschen’. Lange, Carl, ‘Begründung und Entwicklung der Zoppoter Waldoper: Eine nationale Kulturtat des deutschen Ostens’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, ed. Meyer, (1934), 24–6 (p. 24)Google Scholar.
11 ‘Der Naturbühne […] bezeugte nach der Lostrennung Danzigs vom Mutterland mit der aus tiefster Überzeugung geborenen Kraft die ewige Deutschheit unserer Heimat. Heute, die Zoppoter Waldfestspielstätte längst zu einer Weihestatt und Zoppot damit zu einem Kulturzentrum des deutschen Ostens geworden.’ ‘Geleitworte’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, ed. Meyer (1934), 11.
12 Kater, Michael H., The Twisted Muse: Musicians and their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 137 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Himmler quotation is drawn from Bergen, Doris L., ‘The Nazi Concept of “Volksdeutsche” and the Exacerbation of Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, 1939–45’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29 (1994), 569–82 (p. 575)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 On Grass’s biography and its bearing on his literary works, see Taberner, Stuart, ‘Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion’, The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, ed. Taberner, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 139–50Google Scholar.
14 The story is recounted in Einhard Luther, Die Zoppoter Waldoper (Sopot: Traditionsgemeinschaft Zoppot-Travemünde, 1966), 11–12. Luther’s is the only extended study of the Waldoper in print.
15 On the acoustics at the Waldoper, see Einhard Luther, ‘Impressions’, Opera, 17 (autumn 1966), 16–19.
16 Luther, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, 21. Waldoper repertoire between 1909 and 1915 and between 1919 and 1944 is listed ibid., 351–89; there were no performances in 1916–18 or in 1945–59. It included Conradin Kreuzer, Das Nachtlager von Grenada (1909); Wagner, Tannhäuser (1910); Ignaz Brüll, Das goldene Kreuz (1910–11); Smetana, Die verkaufte Braut, and Humperdinck, Hänsel und Gretel (1912); Strauss, Die Zigeunerbaron (1913); Weber, Der Freischütz (1914); Hofmannsthal, Jedermann (1915); Ludwig Anzengruber, Die Kreuzelschreiber, and Ernst Hardt, Tantris der Narr (1919); Clemens Schmalstich, Tänze (1920); and Beethoven, Fidelio (1921). Only Wagner was performed on the main stage between 1922 and 1944, with the exception of rare performances of Beethoven’s Fidelio and Eugen d’Albert’s Tiefland.
17 Luther, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, 21.
18 The Deutsches Bühnen Jahrbuch, 51 (Berlin: Günther & Sohn, 1940) lists open-air stages in many German, Polish and Austrian cities, including Bad Dürkheim, Berlin (Spandau Zitadelle), Castrop-Rauxel, Danzig (associated with the Landestheater Saarpfalz), Eisfeld, Essen (associated with a summer festival), Forst, Frankfurt (the Römberg), Gehren, Gelnhausen, Graz, Hamburg, Hanover (associated with the Herrenhäuser Garten), Heidelberg (associated with the Heidelberger Schloß), Leipzig, Lübeck (associated with the Staatstheater), Lünen (associated with Schloß Buddenburg), Mainau (associated with the Staatstheater Konstanz), Oybin (associated with a Kurort and summer festival), Paderborn (associated with the summer festival ‘Auf der Paderinsel’), Pforzheim, Rathen (associated with a Kurort and a summer festival), Solingen, Tecklenburg, Vienna, Wattenscheid (associated with a summer festival), Weißenberg and Württemberg.
19 Luther, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, 15; Deutsches Bühnen Jahrbuch, 51, p. 62; Mettin, Heinrich, ‘Theater im Natur’, Die Tat, 29/7 (1937), 498–500 (p. 498)Google Scholar.
20 Ellis, ‘Open-Air Opera and Southern French Difference’, 181.
21 Lists of open-air stages and the theatres, summer festivals and/or resorts with which they were associated can be found in the Deutscher Bäder Kalendar (Berlin: Bäder- und Verkehrs-Verlag, 1931) and in issues of the Deutsches Bühnen Jahrbuch.
22 Deutscher Bäder Kalendar, 288.
23 Mettin, ‘Theater im Natur’, 498–9. Other categories of stage include Bergbühne, Bergtheater, Freilichtspiele, Freilichttheater, Freilufttheater, Gartenbühne, Marktbühne, Naturbühne, Schloßbühne, Strandbühne, Waldoper and Waldtheater. Additional categories of stages are listed ibid. and in Rudolf Meyer, Hecken- und Gartentheater in Deutschland im XVII. und XVIII. Jahrhundert (Emsdetten: Lechte, 1934), which also provides a longer bibliography on Hecken- and Gartentheater. Mettin reports that repertoire at open-air stages included (at the Harzer Bergtheater) Shakespeare (Ernst Leopold Stahl, ‘Shakespeare auf der Naturbühne’, Jahrbuch für Deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, 44 (1903), 239–43 (p. 239)); (at the Elbinger Waldoper) Gluck’s Orfeo, Kreuzer’s Das Nachtlager in Granada and Weber’s Der Freischütz (Deutsches Bühnen Jahrbuch, 26 (Berlin: Günther & Sohn, 1915), 397); and (at the Essener Waldoper) Hans Joachim von Loeschenbrand-Horn’s Rheinland, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Weber’s Der Freischütz (Die Musik, 27 (1934), 184, 867).
24 Mettin, ‘Theater im Natur’, 499.
25 Ellis, ‘Open-Air Opera and Southern French Difference’, 185–9.
26 Mosse, George, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1987), 223 Google Scholar. See also Strobl, Gerwin. See also The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 134.Google Scholar
27 Schmidt’s score is now lost, but a discussion of it can be found in August Wappenschmitt, Kurze Einführung in die Dr. Heinrich Schmidt’sche Musik des romantischen Bergfestspieles ‘Die Losburg’ von Ludwig Hacker (Wundsiedel: Heinrich Beer, 1900)Google Scholar.
28 ‘Die Luft ist rein’; ‘einer erhebenden Einheit zusammenwirken’. Hacker, Ludwig, Die Losburg: Romantisches Bergfestspiel in 3 Abteilungen (sieben Bildern), nach alten Chroniken, mit Musik von Heinrich Schmidt (Wunsiedel: Heinrich Beer, 1912), 7 Google Scholar.
29 ‘Heimische unvergleichliche Natur’; ‘die helle Freude der Bevölkerung’; ‘Alles zu Ehre der Heimatstadt’. Ibid., 2–3.
30 Ibid., 63. Hacker also published histories of this region (Geschichte der Stadt Wunsiedel (Wunsiedel: Verlag der Stadtrates, 1927)) and of the festival (Die Geschichte des Losburg-Festspiels (Wunsiedel: Kohler, 1924)).
31 On the Luisenberg’s mythological and geological significance, see among other sources A Handbook for Travellers in Southern Germany: Being a Guide to Würtemberg, Bavaria, Austria, Tyrol, Salzburg, Styria &c., the Austrian and Bavarian Alps, and the Danube from Ulm to the Black Sea (London: Murray, 1863), 115. As this travel guide explains, the mountain was understood as ‘a mountain in ruins’, its large shards of granite ‘furnish[ing] the Titans with ammunition when storming Jupiter in Olympus’ (ibid.). Goethe had engaged in a study of Luisenberg granite as part of a larger pursuit of understanding geological processes: see Goethe, Granit I (1820), in Sämtliche Werke, 25, ed. Wolfgang von Engelhardt and Manfred Wenzel (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 320–1; and Piper, Andrew, ‘Mapping Vision: Goethe, Cartography, and the Novel’, Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, ed. Fisher, Jaimey and Mennel, Barbara (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 41–6Google Scholar.
32 Applegate, Celia, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 3–4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the shift from organic to fossil fuels in this period, see Malm, Andreas, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016)Google Scholar.
33 Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 3–4.
34 Rosenbaum, Adam T., Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 2–3 Google Scholar.
35 Kahn, Fritz, Das Leben des Menschen: Eine volkstümliche Anatomie, Biologie, Physiologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen, 5 vols. (Stuttgart: Kosmos, 1926–31), ii (1926), 258 Google Scholar.
36 Dominick, Raymond, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871–1971 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 87Google Scholar. See Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Die Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Social-Politik, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1866–73).
37 Wagner, Richard, ‘Art and Climate’, in Wagner, The Artwork of the Future and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1895), 249–66 (pp. 266, 259)Google Scholar.
38 Hulme, ‘Reducing the Future to Climate’, 252.
39 Hellpach, Willy, Kultur und Klima: Klima, Wetter, Mensch (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1938), 290 Google Scholar. A gloss on Hellpach’s terminology is provided in Hulme, ‘Reducing the Future to Climate’, 252.
40 Klautke, Egbert, ‘Defining the Volk: Willy Hellpach’s Völkerpsychologie between National Socialism and Liberal Democracy, 1934–1954’, History of European Ideas, 39 (2013), 693–708 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Hellpach’s liberal politics and his efforts to produce academic work that aligned with National Socialist ideology, see Klautke, , The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851–1955 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 104–46Google Scholar.
41 Leitz, Christian, Nazi Foreign Policy, 1933–1945: The Road to Global War (London: Routledge, 2004), 72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
42 ‘Zusammenklang zwischen freier Umgebung und Drama’; ‘eine symbolische Stätte deutscher dramatischer Kunst im Osten’; ‘weiteres zielstrebiges Wirken im Sinne der deutschen kulturellen Wiedergeburt’. ‘Geleitworte’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, ed. Meyer (1934), 7–8.
43 ‘Sie […] wuchs über all diese Aufgaben hinaus zu einer deutschen Mission im Ostraum, als neue Grenzen nach dem Krieg in die Landkarte eingezeichnet wurden.’ Friedrich Albert Meyer, ‘Die Zoppoter Waldoper’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, ed. Meyer (1939), 4–7 (p. 5).
44 ‘Der Wald der Germanen ist ein Welt der Wunder, in ihm finden wir die Wurzeln der Kraft der Germanen. Wer erzählen will von den alten germanischen Recken, von ihrem Leben und ihrem Glauben, der muß hineingehen in dichte Wälder, damit sich ihm das Geheimnis des Blutes offenbart.’ Ibid., 7.
45 Levi, Erik, Music in the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 214.Google Scholar
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47 ‘Geleitworte’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, ed. Meyer (1934), 9.
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50 Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries, 244. On Volksdeutsche resettlement programmes, see Lumans, , ‘A Reassessment of Volksdeutsche and Jews in the Volhynia–Galicia–Narew Resettlement’, The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and its Legacy, ed. Steinweis, Alan E. and Rogers, Daniel E. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 81–98 Google Scholar.
51 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London: Routledge, 2004), 129 Google Scholar.
52 Kitchen, Martin, The Third Reich: Charisma and Community (London: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar.
53 Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 129. Note that here the word Lichtung (‘clearing’) does not appear and there is no apparent resonance with Heidegger’s use of that term.
54 Rossol, Nadine, ‘Performing the Nation: Sports, Spectacles, and Aesthetics in Germany, 1926–1936’, Central European History, 43 (2010), 616–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 633).
55 Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 129; Strobl, The Swastika and the Stage, 59.
56 Henning Eichberg, ‘The Nazi Thingspiel: Theater for the Masses in Fascism and Proletarian Culture’, trans. Robert A. Jones, New German Critique, 11 (spring 1977), 133–50 (p. 139).
57 Niven, William, ‘The Birth of Nazi Drama? Thing Plays’, Theatre under the Nazis, ed. London, 54–95 (p. 73)Google Scholar.
58 Ibid. On the form and function of Thingspiele, see also Donahue-Bombosch, Timothy, Building the Nation: Fascist Mass Spectacle as Worker Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997 Google Scholar), and Kater, Michael H., Culture in Nazi Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
59 Strobl, The Swastika and the Stage, 58.
60 Quoted in Rossol, ‘Performing the Nation’, 632–3.
61 Toepfer, Karl, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 317 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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63 Ibid.
64 Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 129.
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68 Rossol, ‘Performing the Nation’, 632.
69 Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 129.
70 Thacker, Toby, Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 170 Google Scholar.
71 Potter, Art of Suppression, 157; Stollmann, Rainer, ‘Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art: Tendencies of the Aestheticization of Political Life in National Socialism’, trans. Smith, Ronald L., New German Critique, 14 (spring 1978), 41–60 (p. 44)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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74 Rossol, ‘Performing the Nation’, 633.
75 Ibid., 633–4.
76 Hermand, Jost, Culture in Dark Times: Nazi Fascism, Inner Emigration, and Exile (New York: Berghan, 2014), 105–6Google Scholar.
77 Ibid.
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79 The inset text may be translated as: ‘The high point of the sojourn in Sopot is a visit to the Waldoper. It unveils, in a unique fashion, the relationship of nature to works of Richard Wagner. The Richard Wagner Festival has a worldwide reputation as an “important festival site for the Reich”. Visitors number in tens of thousands from all lands. General supervisor Hermann Merz is the heralded artistic director. Conductors of a European reputation have been seen at the Waldoper as guests: Schillings, Knappertsbusch, Elmendorff, Pfitzner. The musical leaders at this time are the Staatskapellmeister Professor Heger (Berlin) and Tutein (Munich). The most significant Wagner interpreters are committed to perform at the festival annually.’
80 Meyer, Friedrich Albert, ‘Der Wald und Wagners Werk’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper (1939), 7–12 (p. 10)Google Scholar.
81 Leitz, Nazi Foreign Policy, 72.
82 Magistrate Demp, ‘Haushaltsplan der Stadt Ostseebad Sopot für 1937’ (18 March 1937). Figures and source materials courtesy of the Muzeum Sopotu (Sopot, Poland).
83 On Waldoper broadcasts, see Stephan Wolting, Bretter, die Kulturkulissen markierten (Wrocław: University of Wrocław, 2003), 277.
84 On Hitler’s affinity with radio, see Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, 158.
85 Luther, ‘Impressions’, 16–19. Comments to this end include Heinrich Knote (tenor, 1922: ‘No theater in the world could create acoustics similar to the Waldoper’s. The gigantic stage, the unsurpassable lighting supporting the magic of nature, brought a unique enthusiasm to each of the artists, impossible in any opera house’); Erich Kleiber (conductor, 1924: ‘The wonder of acoustics of this forest stage enabled every one of the 10,000 visitors even in the most distant corner to understand every word of the singers’); Margarete Arndt-Ober (soprano, 1922–43: ‘The acoustics! You only had to open the mouth and the tone was ringing over the wide, open spaces. Except for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which was famous for its fabulous acoustics, I never met any stage where you could sing so smoothly and where the voices sounded as well as at Zoppot’); and Robert Heger (chief conductor, 1933–43: ‘I often had the impression that the singers were able to produce their tone more tenderly than they ever could do on the normal opera stage. We had the preliminary conditions of playing music with artistic perfection. Then, in addition to those musical and acoustic advantages, we had the unique effects of the forest scenery’).
86 Ellis, ‘Open-Air Opera and Southern French Difference’, 189.
87 Luther, ‘Impressions’, 19.
88 Luther, ‘Impressions’, 19.
89 Ibid.
90 ‘Die Zoppoter Waldoper […] gehört […] zu dem Ideengehalt unserer herrlichen nationalsozialistischen Bewegung. In ihr erstrahlt das Morgenrot einer großen kulturellen Gemeinsamkeit unseres deutschen Volkes. Ihre Kunst gibt der inneren Wiedergeburt des deutschen Menschen die Erfüllung.’ ‘Geleitworte’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, ed. Meyer (1934), 10.
91 Potter, ‘The Arts in Nazi Germany’, 589.
92 ‘Die tiefste Absicht von Wagners Reform in der Idee des Theaters’; ‘das Gemeinschaftsleben zu befruchten’; ‘die Reinigung von den niederen naturhaften Trieben und den Sieg des naturhaft Reinen, so verbinden sich Menschentum und Natur zu einer höheren Einheit’. Gotthold Frotscher, ‘Die Naturbühne als Kultstätte (Das Erlebnis des Parsifal in der Zoppoter Waldoper)’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, ed. Meyer (1934), 46–8 (p. 47).
93 Luther, ‘Impressions’, 18. As Tutein explains: ‘I wanted at all costs to prevent the Rheingold and Der fliegende Holländer of 1938 but, alas, in vain. The Zoppot Waldoper was a natural stage: a wood like wood, trees like trees, air like air, earth like earth, but water like glass – that was nonsense! So in Das Rheingold, the image of the stage at night was enchanting, indeed, but not by nature, now by illusion.’
94 Levi, Music in the Third Reich, 214. Institutions that fell into this category also included the Staatstheater and Philharmonie des Generalgouvernements in Cracow.
95 Dümling, Albrecht, ‘The Target of Racial Purity: The “Degenerate Music Exhibition in Dusseldorf, 1938’, Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Etlin, Richard A. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 43–72 (p. 48)Google Scholar.
96 Ibid.
97 Friedrich Albert Meyer, ‘Wie Max von Schillings mit der Zoppoter Waldoper verwuchs’, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, ed. Meyer (1934), 31–4 (p. 31).
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109 Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, 88.
110 Ibid.
111 Vaget, Hans Rudolf, ‘“Du warst mein Feind von je”: The Beckmesser Controversy Revisited’, Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation, ed. Nicholas Vasonzyi (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 190–208 (p. 206)Google Scholar.
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113 Imort, ‘Eternal Forest–Eternal Volk’, 55–6.
114 Neocleous, Mark, Fascism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 67 Google Scholar. On the Reich’s use of Hellenic imagery and pursuit of Hellenic–Germanic narrative, see Mazower, Mark, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001 Google Scholar), and Johann Chapoutot, Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2016).
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116 Kater, The Twisted Muse, 137.
117 Wagner programming at the Waldoper, which appears to have halted in 1944, resumed in 1965. Luther, Die Zoppoter Waldoper, 389–90.
118 The Sopot International Song Festival was founded in 1961 by Władysław Szpilman and was housed at the Waldoper from 1964. Dean Vuletic suggests that Sopot was chosen for this festival because it was ‘a town synonymous with entertainment and tourism’ (Vuletic, Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 96), which in turn neutralized its history as a town associated with the Nazi past. From 1961 to 1980, it was called the Intervision Song Contest, a Soviet-bloc rival to the Eurovision Song Contest. On Intervision, see Steve Rosenberg, ‘The Cold War Rival to Eurovision’, BBC News, 14 May 2012, available at <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18006446> (accessed 27 July 2019).
119 Taberner, ‘Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion’, 139.
120 Günter Grass, ‘How I Spent the War: A Recruit in the Waffen S.S.’, trans. Michael Heim, New Yorker, 4 June 2007, available at <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/06/04/how-i-spent-the-war> (accessed 21 July 2019).
121 Ibid.
122 Ibid.
123 ‘Nobel Laureate Grass Sues Publisher over Nazi SS Claim’, Deutsche Welle, 24 November 2007, available at <https://www.dw.com/en/nobel-laureate-grass-sues-publisher-over-nazi-ss-claim/a-2970533> (accessed 17 July 2019).
124 Taberner, ‘Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion’, 139.
125 King, Nicola, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 21 Google Scholar. Paraphrased in Katharina Hall, ‘Günter Grass’s “Danzig Quintet”’, The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, ed. Taberner, 67–81 (p. 73).
126 Hall, ‘Günter Grass’s “Danzig Quintet”’, 73. On Grass and memory, see Hall, Günter Grass’s ‘Danzig Quintet’: Explorations in the Memory and History of the Nazi Era from ‘Die Blechtrommel’ to ‘Im Krebsgang’ (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).
127 Grass, ‘How I Spent the War’.
128 Hall, ‘Günter Grass’s “Danzig Quintet”’, 73. Grass’s treatment of memory and recollection has been read in psychoanalytical terms, particularly as a reflection of Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit. On this approach to Grass, see Friedrich Wilhelm Eickhoff, ‘On Nachträglichkeit: The Modernity of an Old Concept’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87 (2006), 1453–69.
129 Potter, ‘The Arts in Nazi Germany’, 589.
130 Grass, The Tin Drum, trans. Breon Mitchell (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2009), 95.
131 Ibid., 111.
132 Note that The Tin Drum is written in Oskar’s voice, vacillating between first and third person.
133 Grass, The Tin Drum, 112–13.
134 Ibid., 113.
135 Ibid., 112–13.
136 Ibid.
137 On Grass’s mockery of Wagner in this episode, see Wesley V. Blomster, ‘Oskar at the Zoppoter Waldoper’, Modern Language Notes, 84/3 (April 1969), 467–72; Siegfried Mews, Günter Grass and his Critics: From ‘The Tin Drum’ to ‘Crabwalk’ (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), 27; and Ben-Horin, Michael, Musical Biographies: The Music of Memory in Post-1945 German Literature (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 71–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
138 Thesz, Nicolas, The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass: Stages of Speech, 1959–2015 (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2018), 184 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
139 Grass, The Tin Drum, 113.
140 Ibid., 112–13.
141 Ibid.
142 The Günter Grass Reader, ed. Helmut Frielinghaus (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2004), 66.
143 Grass, The Tin Drum, 95.
144 Mews, Günter Grass and his Critics, 16.
145 Botstein, Leon, ‘German Jews and Wagner’, Richard Wagner and his World, ed. Grey, Thomas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 151–200 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dirk Kurbjuweit, ‘Can We Separate the Man from his Works?’, Der Spiegel, 12 April 2013, available at <https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/richard-wagner-a-composer-forever-associated-with-hitler-a-892600.html> (accessed 10 December 2019).