Music and Internationalism in Nazi Germany: Provenance and Post-War Consequences

Introduction – Nachholbedarf as corrective to anti-internationalism?

In October 1945, five months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, German critic Edmund Nick wrote the following in the American-sponsored Munich newspaper Neue Zeitung:

For we had, so to speak, been kicked and kicked on the ground for twelve years. Our concerts rarely had any value other than as an acoustic museum of older music. Now there is much with which to catch up. Our ears need tutoring to become open again for new music. We have to hold on, so that we can return to a better place among the leading musical nations. ¹⁵⁵

Nick made these comments in a review of the second concert in a new series organized by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, which would later come to be called Musica Viva. It was an orchestral concert given by the Bayerisches Staatsorchester, conducted by Bertil Wetzelsberger, with soprano Maud Cunita, featuring Mahler’s Fourth Symphony (1899–1900), Hartmann’s violin concerto Musik der Trauer (1939), Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata (1924) and Janáček’s very early Suite for string orchestra (1891). German audiences had had almost no exposure to the music of Mahler for the last 12 years (on account of his Jewish heritage), nor of that of Hartmann, who had been prominent in the later part of the Weimar Republic but then had essentially withdrawn from the musical life of Nazi Germany.

Nick’s rhetoric was commonplace among critics and promoters immediately after the war’s end, providing an ideology which came to be labelled Nachholbedarf (very loosely translatable as ‘the need to catch up’). In a speech to mark the establishment of the Freie Gruppe of artists in Heidelberg in January 1946, artistic director Bernhard Klein stressed the need to catch up with the work of other countries, despite the fact that the most prominent new piece of music at the event was the 1945 Serenade for flute, oboe and bassoon by Wolfgang Fortner, ¹⁵⁶ a former Nazi party (NSDAP) member who had conducted the city’s Hitlerjugend-Kammerorchester. ¹⁵⁷ A few months later, in the Wiesbadener Kurier, critic Ernst Krause (another former NSDAP member, though only from 1941) ¹⁵⁸ wrote scathingly about the effect of Joseph Goebbels, the Reichsmusikkammer, the racial laws and the Entartete Musik exhibition on musical life, concluding, ‘We have much with which to catch up!’ (‘Wir haben viel nachzuholen!’). ¹⁵⁹

In the programme for the Zeitgenössische Musikwoche in Bad Nauheim in July 1946, the first of a highly prominent series of festivals organized by Radio Frankfurt, which relocated to Frankfurt the following year and became known as the Woche für neue Musik, German-born US control officer and head of music for the radio station Holger E. Hagen wrote, ‘For the first time since the armistice, an attempt is being made to present to the musical public the latest works of contemporary composers from all over the world in a united form.’ Other prefaces by the artistic director Heinz Schröter and others expressed similar sentiments. ¹⁶⁰ One critic wrote of how the newest works presented at the event would form a ‘sonic bridge over the abysses of the last years’. ¹⁶¹ There was some truth in this, as works of Hindemith and Schoenberg featured prominently, ¹⁶² as well as those of the American composers William Schuman and Quincy Porter, practically unknown in Germany before 1945. However, although the festival featured the likes of Fortner, Ernst Pepping and Heinrich Sutermeister (all prominent in Nazi Germany), other music by Bartók, Malipiero or even Prokofiev was far from unknown, at least in pre-war Nazi Germany. ¹⁶³ Wolfgang Steinecke’s introductory text for the first Ferienkurse für internationale neue Musik at Darmstadt in August–September 1946 was another prime example of Nachholbedarf rhetoric:

Behind us is a period during which almost all the vital forces of new music were cut off from German musical life. For twelve years, names such as those of Hindemith and Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Krenek, Milhaud and Honegger, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Bartók, Weill and many others were disdained. For twelve years, a criminal cultural politics robbed German musical life of its leading personalities and its interconnections with the world. ¹⁶⁴

In some, but not all, cases this could have been justified, but then (as in the case of Stravinsky) only for part of the duration of the Reich, as Steinecke would have known well.

The message was consistent and clear: Germany had been cut off from international and modernist developments in music for 12 years, creating an imperative to mount new festivals and concert series, and include new music in more mainstream programming. Yet, as I will show, this was at most only a partially true assumption, albeit one convenient for post-war promoters and advocates.

Myths of domination of Wagner and military music, and total prohibitions on jazz and atonal music, have been addressed elsewhere, ¹⁶⁵ but less sustained attention has been paid to the profile of international music within Nazi Germany. A perspective which maintains that the ideology of Nazism isolated Germany from all other countries is echoed in various studies of culture in Nazi Germany which consider the process of ‘Germanization’ in terms of the pathological and fanatical exclusion, from the very beginning of the regime, of the work of Jewish artists. But the role of non-German, non-Jewish artists and art, especially from countries allied to the Third Reich, is not considered. ¹⁶⁶ Fascism was and is an international phenomenon, whose origins have been argued to have begun in France, Italy or even the United States, ¹⁶⁷ and various such movements with common ideological traits sprang up soon in Europe, the first to take power being Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista in Italy in October 1922. The assumption of power by the NSDAP in Germany in January 1933 was followed by other regimes that have been considered fascist, in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia and Japan, ¹⁶⁸ not to mention collaborative movements in occupied countries, also helped by friendly if nominally ‘neutral’ regimes in Spain and Portugal. The international character of the fascist movement became clearest when a congress of delegates from far-right movements in 13 countries met in Montreux in December 1934. ¹⁶⁹ It is possible to accept Stanley Payne’s view of fascism as ‘a form of revolutionary ultra-nationalism’, and still recognize how multiple movements manifesting this quality in different nations can find, and have found, common purpose. ¹⁷⁰

A comparative study of aesthetic ideologies and practical actions relating to music in multiple fascist countries is beyond the scope of this article, in which I will restrict myself to engagements within Nazi Germany with the music and musicians of other nations. Several prominent figures in Nazi musical life espoused an ideology which promoted ‘strong’ nationalism characterized by exclusivity – even purity – but respected the right of different nations each to espouse such a thing. This was reflected in a range of societies, organizations and exchange programmes which linked Nazi Germany to other ‘friendly’ nations, while three different festival organizations responded to this changed political climate in various ways, as I shall detail below. But in some ways the process went further, stressing cultural commonalities and interactions, not least with other ‘Nordic’ nations.

Nationalisms in multiple nations

The cosmopolitan musical culture of Weimar Germany had had its critics from the beginning, expressed most obviously in the polemics between Paul Bekker and Hans Pfitzner, ¹⁷¹ which led to a plethora of writings on neue Musik in the first half of the 1920s. ¹⁷² In Die neue Aesthetik der musikalischen Impotenz (1920), Pfitzner associated Bekker with an ‘international Jewish tendency’, and attempts with ‘Russian-Jewish criminals’ at revolutionary cultural upheaval. ¹⁷³ In the preface to the third edition published in 1926, he wrote of völkerfeindliche Internationalismus (‘anti-Volk internationalism’) in music, linked to related tendencies. ¹⁷⁴

Such sentiments were echoed in traditional music journals such as the Allgemeine Musikzeitung, Zeitschrift für Musik and Signale für die musikalische Welt. Alfred Heuss, editor of the Zeitschrift für Musik, wrote in 1921 that Franz Schreker’s opera Der Schatzgräber and its supporters, including Bekker (whom Heuss compared to Wagner’s Alberich) embodied a ‘crime against the German soul’. ¹⁷⁵ Three years later Heuss wrote of the country ‘dealing with a test of strength between Germanness and – now let it be said openly – a specifically Jewish musical spirit’. ¹⁷⁶ This type of view undoubtedly entailed a quite fanatical antisemitism and anti-communism, ¹⁷⁷ and a wider hatred for a type of cultural miscegenation, but not necessarily a rejection of multiple national musics – nor even acceptance of non-German musics defined in fundamentally racial terms. In the years leading up to the Nazi takeover, musical ultra-nationalism reached its apex with the publication of Richard Eichenauer’s Musik und Rasse, which updated Wagner’s Das Judenthum in der Musik in light of new racial theories in order to criticize composers such as Mahler and Schoenberg for what were portrayed as their attempts to sound German and supposedly corrosive effect upon German music. ¹⁷⁸ To the likes of Eichenauer, such composers’ actual nationality and upbringing was immaterial; the fact of their being Jewish placed them outside any national affiliation viewed as acceptable.

From early on during the Nazi regime, there were certainly xenophobic views on music expressed publicly, ¹⁷⁹ but some other Nazi ideologues found ways of embracing multiple nationalisms. This relatively non-antagonistic attitude, difficult to imagine in a post-1945 world in which nationalism is frequently equated with extreme racial or tribal ideologies, does not look so strange if situated within a longer history going back at least as far as the Enlightenment. In early writings, Johann Gottfried Herder celebrated many nations (including those in Peru, the Caribbean or the North Pacific islands), defined separately above all in terms of their ‘tribal language’ and poetic and other cultural traditions emanating from that language, while recognizing the dangers of mutual enmity which could then follow. ¹⁸⁰ While later also recognizing geographical factors, ¹⁸¹ Herder’s view was unequivocal: ‘The most natural state is thus also a single people, with a single national character,’ and to this end he found ‘unnatural’ the mixing of peoples and enlargement of states. ¹⁸² While this can superficially be read as an argument against cosmopolitanism and miscegenation, equally it can be interpreted as being in opposition to imperialism and expansionism. ¹⁸³ Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitan ideals and construction of patriotism in terms of a state – a political entity, not defined in cultural or ethnic terms nor representing a ‘people’ ¹⁸⁴ – are sharply distinct from and in some ways fundamentally opposed to the ideas of Herder, but as Pheng Cheah argues cogently, Kant’s opposition was to the principle of absolute statism rather than nations per se. ¹⁸⁵ Cheah notes further how Kant’s ideals were found to be adaptable in support of the early nationalistic writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and many of the nationalist movements (Greek, Belgian, Polish) which arose in early post-Napoleonic Europe, ¹⁸⁶ while a ‘nationalist cosmopolitics’ can be traced through the course of the nineteenth century. Daniel S. Malachuk does so using examples such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Walt Whitman, who viewed nationalism and cosmopolitanism as allied ideologies in the name of a universalist vision. ¹⁸⁷

The late nineteenth century of course saw a shift from ‘civic’, ‘voluntarist’ or simply ‘territorial’ nationalisms to their ‘ethnic’ variant, ¹⁸⁸ while the series of European wars from the 1860s through to 1918 undoubtedly delivered a major blow to cosmopolitan ideals. The ultra-nationalism of Nazi Germany was clearly incompatible with any type of meaningful cosmopolitanism, but the regime was not isolationist, and actively sought allies and international influence. As such, extreme German nationalism had to be combined with some at least limited recognition of other cultures, while the general paranoia of post-1918 German nationalists regarding transnationalism (by which I mean a phenomenon perceived as standing outside or even sublating national traditions), including in music, meant that this acceptance of multiple nationalism, tempered by strong inclinations towards German domination and supremacy, was the only meaningful way forward. A clear articulation of this position for music was provided by Nazi critic Hermann Killer (later an editor of the Lexikon der Juden in der Musik) ¹⁸⁹ in an article written in advance of the Internationales Musikfest in Hamburg in June 1935. This event was organized by the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV) in association with the Ständiger Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten (see Figure 2). In the article, Killer clearly distinguished ‘Marxist-inspired political internationalism’, which he claimed blurred all boundaries of nations and peoples, from international cultural exchange, which (naturally enough) ought in Killer’s view to take place in Germany as a ‘natural cultural centre of Europe’.¹⁹⁰ Killer was more ready than some to acknowledge the receptiveness of German culture to foreign influences, though he insisted nonetheless that art must be intimately bound together with race, nationality and nation. Killer’s anti-transnationalism was clear through his condemnation of ‘all-world-artistry’ (‘Allerweltsartistentum’), arguing that modern music had crowded out nationality, and for this reason Germany was in the process of eliminating foreign musical influences, thus abandoning the internationalism he had briefly entertained. At the Hamburg festival there would be a celebration of music of ‘all the countries of the world’, in a spirit of internationalism and friendly cooperation, but with national musics to the fore.¹⁹¹

Figure 2 Full programme for the Internationales Musikfest, Hamburg, 1935.

From Die Musik, 27/9 (June 1935), 644.

On paper this did not look so different from the ideology of the ISCM (in terms of its development with no strong aesthetic agenda, as distinct from early desires on the part of German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian representatives for an avant-garde focus), ¹⁹² or indeed of a good deal of international festivals and events in the first decades after 1945. But in reality, the programme featured a clear majority of German works, many more than from any other single nation, and contemporary works by a relatively conservative selection of composers such as Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Albert Roussel, Heinrich Kaminski, Manuel de Falla, Ture Rangström, Jean Sibelius, Yrjö Kilpinen, Zoltán Kodály and Ludomir Różycki (thus no composers from outside Europe), but no Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Edgard Varèse, Darius Milhaud, Alois Hába or Gian Francesco Malipiero. ¹⁹³ Even this was not enough to satisfy Nazi critic Herbert Gerigk, who found the event ‘oppressive’ and indeed unrepresentative, blaming a lack of care over the programming, which was insufficiently open to younger figures and national socialist organizations. ¹⁹⁴

If Killer espoused a mild internationalism, the complex figure of Peter Raabe went further in the direction of a moderate variety of the same. Raabe was a dedicated follower of Hitler who succeeded Richard Strauss in 1935 as president of the Reichsmusikkammer but whose wider aesthetic sympathies are evidenced in the fact that he had conducted works of Schoenberg, Hindemith, Erdmann, Tiessen, Scriabin and others who would now be categorized as modernist (and who were marginalized in the Reich) while Generalmusikdirektor in Aachen from 1918 to 1929; Rabbe had also been impressed upon hearing Berg’s Wozzeck. ¹⁹⁵ In an article published in 1926, Raabe had advocated restrictions on ‘internationalism’, as this was causing a decline in German music, which needed protecting. ¹⁹⁶ However, at a speech given nine years later at the Hamburg festival, Raabe denied that music need choose between nationalism and internationalism. He acknowledged the difficulty of rooting art in folk culture, and the complexities for composers and artists who were born to parents of multiple nationalities or who received nationally varied education or other cultural influences. Raabe came close to nationalist cosmopolitics in a passage from this speech in which he argued that one could reconcile the Goetheian idea of ‘world-citizenship’ (‘Weltbürgertum’) with national allegiances and roots; he cited Goethe, Schiller, Kleist and others in support of this argument. However, while these classic thinkers could reconcile their art with an interest in foreign political ideas, there was not an equivalent for composers. Music, by contrast to literature, dealt not with some ‘universal language’ which transcended boundaries, as many had claimed, but rather with feeling, which stood above political concerns. ¹⁹⁷

Other Nazi writers found different ways of interpreting the relationship between German and other musics. Ernst Bücken attempted to write a history of plural musical developments starting from the ‘Orient’ and moving through the classical world via various interactions or even battles between different national styles during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, until – like a miracle (after a period of uncertainty and blurring of styles) – Germanic ‘national taste’ is represented through the Mannheim School and the First Viennese School. This point is reached less than halfway through the book and the remainder is heavily dominated by Germanic composers battling for supremacy with other traditions, which are recognized but placed in a decidedly secondary position. ¹⁹⁸ In a much more explicitly racially focused book from 1944, Hans Engel attempted to sublate the German–Italian opposition that features strongly in Bücken by claiming racial commonalities between southern Germany and northern Italy, then contrasting an underlying biological unity with different musical manifestations owing to the cultural properties of distinct regions – unsurprisingly favouring the Germanic, in which ‘Nordic’ qualities were said to remain more unsullied by encounters with other races. ¹⁹⁹

Despite some internationalist leanings, for most Nazi writers, music involving or associated with Jewish people was wholly off-limits. Robert Pessenlehner attempted in 1937 to claim that in Schoenberg’s work there is the beginning of ‘a shift in music, not towards internationalism, but towards a non-European musical formation, in which non-Aryan linguistic rules find expression’ (emphasis added). ²⁰⁰ A different and more common antisemitic formation can be found in the work of Walther Wünsch, who in a favourable 1938 article about south Slavic folk music portrayed the Balkans as a ‘mighty bridge from the Orient to the Occident’. ²⁰¹ However, in a follow-up article, he claimed this tradition to have been undermined by Jewish city dwellers involved in commerce, and for this reason he celebrated its antisemitic songs. ²⁰² Those who could celebrate a plural range of European musics had consistently to view Jewish traditions as alien to these.

Societies, organizations and exchange programmes ²⁰³

In contrast to the view presented by the advocates of Nachholbedarf, there were many cultural and indeed musical interactions and exchanges between Nazi Germany and other countries. But this process was far from unlimited; in general, the other nations in question fell into one of three categories: (a) ‘racial’ allies, viewed as fellow ‘Aryans’, including the Scandinavian countries (including Iceland) and Finland, the Netherlands and, to some extent, Belgium; (b) political allies, most notably Italy and Hungary from an earlier stage, then Japan, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and even Russia during the period of the Nazi–Soviet Pact; (c) other European nations with which there were more mixed relations, notably Britain, France, Poland and the Soviet Union from 1933, the majority of which would later become hostile. ²⁰⁴

I will first consider category (b). A range of exchange and friendship societies between Germany and other nations were created both before and during the Third Reich, which to varying degrees (some of them beginning as trading organizations) promoted academic, intellectual, cultural and some political relationships, organized cultural events and supported visiting foreign artists and scholars. ²⁰⁵ Societies pairing Germany with Greece, Bulgaria, Finland, Sweden, France, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Japan, Hungary, Spain, Italy (with the support of Mussolini) and Britain (Deutsch–Griechische Gesellschaft, Deutsch–Bulgarische Gesellschaft and so on) were formed between 1914 and 1932, ²⁰⁶ and these became variously stronger or weaker after 1933 in a manner generally mirroring wider political allegiances or antagonisms between Germany and the other countries in question. Further such societies were formed after the Nazi assumption of power, usually with clearer ideological motivations: with Norway in 1934, with England in 1935 (founded directly by Joachim von Ribbentrop and used to try to cement better relations with England), with the Netherlands in 1936, somewhat more atypically with Poland in 1938, with Belgium in 1938, then with Slovakia in January 1939, around six weeks before the creation of the fascist Slovak Republic following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. During the Second World War there followed societies with Hungary in April 1940, Denmark in autumn 1940 (following the occupation, on the model of the Norwegian society), Romania in 1943 (somewhat late considering Ion Antonescu’s signing of the Tripartite Pact in 1940 and participation of Romanian forces in Operation Barbarossa in 1941) and Croatia in 1944 (the last of its type, narrowing the earlier partnership with Yugoslavia in light of the redrawing of borders and subsequent installation of satellite fascist regimes).

While some of these organizations were based in multiple German cities (the Deutsch–Griechische Gesellschaft, for example, had branches in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin), they were nonetheless – as Johannes Dafinger has noted – were generally small and highly elite. ²⁰⁷ By 1940, the largest in Berlin were those with Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan, but a further 26 organizations existed. ²⁰⁸ Some fragmentary documents show that in the summer of that year Goebbels and von Ribbentrop even urged Albert Speer to construct a large building in Berlin to house all these types of associations to which they were sympathetic (representing nations allied to Greater Germany), and thus bring them into a type of centralized arrangement. ²⁰⁹ While this never came to fruition (because of other priorities), it shows how importantly they viewed such activities.

All of this proceeded in parallel with concentrations of representation of composers and performers from these various other nations. ²¹⁰ These began with concerts featuring music and musicians from Nazi Germany’s most obvious ally, fascist Italy, intensifying after the declaration of the Rome–Berlin Axis in November 1936 and leading to various events celebrating the friendship between the two nations. Hungary was also an early key ally, having moved to the political right from 1932 onwards under prime ministers Gyula Gömbös and Kálmán Darányi, and many music events followed the foundation of the Deutsch–Ungarisches Kulturabkommen in May 1936, at the behest of Goebbels and others. As other countries became more closely aligned with Germany, concerts and exchange concerts were sponsored or promoted by the appropriate international societies, with considerable help from the German Foreign Ministry under the control of Hans Sellschopp from 1939. ²¹¹ Spanish music became more prevalent in Germany from early in the civil war, and especially after Franco’s victory; prominent events featuring Greek music followed the coming to power of the authoritarian regime of Ioannis Metaxas in Greece in August 1936, as did Bulgarian music after King Boris III took direct rule in 1935 and gradually moved towards alignment with the Axis (after which came a major Deutsch–Bulgarisches Konzert in Breslau in late 1941 to celebrate the two nations’ friendship).

Following the outbreak of war, in December 1939 Killer argued that ‘German art, and in particular music, is placed in the front line of the spiritual defence of the country’, but that this was also a reason for the continuation of international musical exchange events. ²¹² In 1940, a review in Die Musik on musical life in Munich pointed out how ‘cultural exchange with friendly nations was very important’, and went on to mention exchanges with Italy, Bulgaria and Japan. ²¹³ Exchanges also increased with Romania (especially featuring conductor George Georgescu, who had appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic since 1935) after Ion Antonescu took power in September 1940 and the two nations signed both the Tripartite and Anti-Comintern Pacts (see Figure 3); and similarly with Croatia after Ante Pavelić and the Ustaše took power in April 1941. The Berlin Philharmonic presented a series of government-ordered concerts in 1940–1 with guest conductors from Spain, Italy, Japan and Croatia.²¹⁴ Many articles in the Nazi-controlled music press presented sympathetic views of the art and folk musics of these other nations.

Figure 3 Advert for an Internationales Austauschkonzert: Rumänien, organized by the Singakademie Berlin, 6 February 1941. Führer durch die Konzertsäle Berlins, 21/20 (1941), 5.

Despite the obvious ethnic distances between central Europeans and East Asians, the Japanese were even referred to by Hitler as ‘honorary Aryans’, ²¹⁵ and there was a wide range of German–Japanese musical interactions during the Reich. Japanese conductors Hidemaro Konoye and Kōichi Kishi conducted the Berlin Philharmonic from early in the regime (Konoye was described to Staatssekretär Hans Heinrich Lammers by Staatskomimissar Hans Hinkel as ‘the Japanese Furtwängler’ as early as October 1933); ²¹⁶ and after the signing of the Anti-Comintern pact in November 1936, the Deutsch–Japanische Gesellschaft increased its cultural activities for propagandistic reasons. ²¹⁷ A concert Konoye conducted in Leipzig two days after the signing of the pact included some traditional Japanese court music; it was greatly admired by Kurt Herbst in Die Musik, not least for Konoye’s exactitude and sharp rhythms, from which he concluded that ‘the Japanese interpret the music of our cultural circles very well’. ²¹⁸ A review by Fritz Stege of a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Konoye, featuring Kilpinen’s Fjeld-Lieder, suggested that Konoye’s more distant geographic origins were appropriate for conducting Finnish music, but also gave high praise to his interpretations of Schubert and Brahms. ²¹⁹ Richard Ohlekopf portrayed Konoye as one ‘who has grasped the spirit of German music in such a way that he is able to be its authoritative advocate in his country’. ²²⁰ Other articles from around this time also celebrated Japanese traditional music, comparing it to the culture of ancient Greece. ²²¹ Konoye recorded with the Berlin Philharmonic, including one 78rpm release in 1938 comprising the German national anthem, the Horst-Wessel-Lied and the Japanese national anthem in Konoye’s own arrangement. ²²² During the war, his press releases spoke of ‘comradeship with German artists’ ²²³ and he eventually gave concerts to boost the morale of soldiers and civilians (see Figure 4). After a successful concert in December 1942, violinist Nejiko Suwa was presented with a Stradivari violin by Goebbels in the presence of the Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Ōshima, whose speech claimed that this symbolized the close cultural relationship between the two countries. ²²⁴ Konoye’s score of Etenraku (1930), based on the traditional gagaku melody, was played widely throughout the Third Reich and its allies. ²²⁵

Figure 4 Hidemaro Konoye conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942. Stills from ‘Hidemaro Konoye conducts …’, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9MK9QA5s2c> (accessed 29 July 2022).

Ideologies of pan-Germanic or pan-Nordic racial purity – the latter of which had informed the creation of the Richard Wagner Gesellschaft fur germanische Kunst und Kultur back in 1913 and were reflected in such books as Eichenauer’s Musik und Rasse (1932), constructing a ‘Nordic’ musical identity and incorporating canonical Germanic composers based on both a proclivity for polyphony and an aptitude for battle ²²⁶ – underlay other musical events from early in the regime. A Nordische Gesellschaft, originally set up in 1921 in Lübeck to promote trade and cultural exchange, became a vehicle for fanatical racial ideologies from 1934, counting Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg among its members. ²²⁷ The society promoted a wide range of events (especially in Lübeck) celebrating Nordic music to the extent that it could be linked to that from Germany, albeit not in a relationship of equals. (For an example of a Nordische Gesellschaft concert see Figure 5.) In 1933, an article in Die Musik held up Grieg and Sibelius as shining examples of Blut und Boden in contrast to the ‘worthless drivel’ of atonality, the product of a ‘Jewish-inclined clique’. ²²⁸ Others who featured regularly in performances promoted by the Nordische Gesellschaft included Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg, whose opera Fanal was presented in Braunschweig in February 1934 then produced in a range of other cities, and the Finnish composer Kilpinen, who was used by Nazi critic Stege as an example of the links between Finnish and German music.²²⁹

Figure 5 Advert in Führer durch die Konzertsäle Berlins for a Deutsch–Dänisches Konzert given by the Berlin Philharmonic, 5 April 1934, in association with the Nordische Gesellschaft.

Dutch music appeared prominently at various points, especially as part of a Holländisches Musikfest in Wiesbaden in May 1935, while works of Henk Badings were performed in various contexts. But after the occupation of the Low Countries in 1940, more active attempts were made to propagandize for common Germanic musical roots. Franck was presented as an essentially Germanic composer, ²³⁰ while an article in Die Musik paired together ‘Jewish and Francophile interest groups’ in opposition to Flemish music (in line with Hitler’s instructions to the invaders of Belgium to ‘favour the Flemish’ over the Walloons and stoke antagonisms between the two primary groups). ²³¹

There were events in the 1930s featuring music of nations that would turn hostile (Britain, France and Poland), sometimes involving their own exchange societies. The Deutsch–Französische Gesellschaft in particular supported the 1938 Baden-Baden festival (see below) and presented some other events. But following a communiqué from Raabe on 1 October 1939, confirmed on 1 February 1940 and further on 4 November 1941, Polish, British and French music (with the specific exceptions of the music of Chopin and Bizet’s Carmen) were essentially prohibited. ²³² Russian music had continued to be heard in the 1930s, including a number of Stravinsky performances, but received a boost during the period of the Nazi–Soviet Pact between August 1939 and July 1941. ²³³ Radio Munich cancelled a talk scheduled for 25 August 1939 entitled ‘I Accuse Moscow – the Comintern Plan for World Dictatorship’ and replaced it with 30 minutes of Russian music. ²³⁴ Prominent concerts of Russian or Slavic music were heard in Berlin (including a number of Prokofiev performances by the Berlin Philharmonic), Cologne, Osnabrück, Kiel and Baden-Baden, while Walter Gieseking revised his repertoire to add Russian music. ²³⁵ After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Baden-Baden orchestra under Gotthold Ephraim Lessing still programmed works of Tchaikovsky and Borodin in two concerts, ²³⁶ but then Raabe banned performances of all Russian music from 15 July 1941. ²³⁷

However, one should be wary of attributing too many developments to wider artistic policy. Much of the most internationally oriented programming, like that which continued to feature some more advanced forms of modernism, was as much the result of particular individuals’ work as of any wider artistic policy: Gerhard Frommel and Hans Rosbaud in Frankfurt, Carl Schuricht in Wiesbaden, Fritz Zaun in Berlin, Fritz Büchtger and Adolf Mennerich in Munich, Johannes Schüler and Albert Bittner in Essen, Ewald Lindemann in Braunschweig, Adalbert Kalix in Nuremberg. Some other institutions did also play a crucial role, especially the Berliner Singakademie, under the directorship of Georg Schumann (which continued to organize many foreign exchanges, as it had done since the beginning of the century), and the Preußische Akademie der Künste in Berlin (which organized many international exchange concerts from 1937 onwards). What is most significant is that all of these were able to proceed with these activities generally without interference and sometimes with encouragement.

Festival organizations with international programming: the Ständiger Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten

There was a range of one-off festivals or themed concert series in Nazi Germany showcasing international music, such as the Dresden Philharmonic’s series of concerts of Meistern des Auslands in winter 1936–7, or the Internationales Orchester-Musikfest in Wiesbaden in May 1939, which brought together orchestras and musicians from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. More central to musical life during this period were three principal recurrent festivals which each featured a degree of international music. The ADMV, founded by Franz Liszt and Franz Brendel in 1861, ²³⁸ was at its outset dedicated to the promotion of the latest German music, though always featured a certain amount of music from elsewhere. For a period in the 1920s, the festival incorporated Germanic composers associated by conservatives with a type of internationalist modernism (including Schoenberg, Hindemith, Schulhoff and others) and also a few works by foreign composers such as Stravinsky and Bartók. However, the ADMV became much more conservative after Siegmund von Hausegger assumed the presidency in 1926, and continued in this vein until it was thoroughly Nazified by 1934. ²³⁹ After Raabe took over the presidency in 1935, from which time dates the Hamburg festival mentioned earlier, there was included some slightly more advanced music (including Elektromusik in the 1936 Berlin festival), though generally by Germans; but after others schemed against Raabe, ²⁴⁰ the ADMV was replaced by the Reichsmusikkammer in 1937. One event to note, which coincided with the Frankfurt/Darmstadt ADMV in 1937, was the exhibition Schöpferes Musikleben des Auslands, which featured composers from 17 European countries, including Ravel, Dallapiccola, Szymanowski, Hába and Bartók. ²⁴¹

The second internationally oriented festival was the Internationales Zeitgenössisches Musikfest, which ran in Baden-Baden from 1936 to 1939 and has been written about in detail by Joan Evans. ²⁴² This featured music from 17 mostly western European countries and was described positively by Friedrich Herzog in Die Musik as an ‘international music festival with national emphasis’, entailing an ‘amicable cultural competition among nations’, in contrast with events that had taken place in Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden in the 1920s. ²⁴³

But the example that best exemplifies an ideology promulgating multiple nationalisms, albeit with a clear German domination, was that embodied in the festivals organized by the Ständiger Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten, formed by Strauss during his time as president of the Reichsmusikkammer. This organization, originally designed to protect composers’ international rights and to organize exchange concerts between nations, was active from 1934 to 1939, with representatives from 20 other European countries and largely directed by Austrian-Czech composer Emil von Reznicek. ²⁴⁴ It was nonetheless highly German-dominated, not least because most of the non-German representatives had studied in Germany. ²⁴⁵ Seven festivals took place (see Figure 6),²⁴⁶ as well as a range of exchange concerts,²⁴⁷ while further festivals were planned but did not materialize.²⁴⁸

Figure 6 Cover of the brochure for the Internationales Musikfest, Dresden, 1937, organized by the Ständiger Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten.

Much of the founding ideology of the organization came out of an extended and ranting article by Gerigk about the 1934 Venice Biennale. Interestingly, Gerigk actually blamed Italian fascism, with its avant-gardist elements, for severing Italian music’s connection with Blut und Boden, so that ‘helpless Dadaist and unequivocally bolshevist artistic trends’ were welcome, and what Gerigk recognized as true German music did not receive its due ²⁴⁹ (thus pre-empting the aesthetic disjunction in this respect between the two nations which came to a head following the Ausstellung Italienischer Kunst in Berlin in November–December 1937). ²⁵⁰ On the validity of festivals in general, Gerigk wrote:

This question must be answered in the negative. There is no longer today any justification for renouncing the Volk. Here there are only alien [volksfremde] elements which have found their way from the intellect into the founding of new directions for art. This has continued as long as government agencies have been found which think in the same way. As long as funds have been available, such funds have been taken away from real art. ²⁵¹

As such, the concerts of the Ständiger Rat stood in direct opposition to the perceived emphasis on transnational modernism thought to be represented by the ISCM. ²⁵² The Hamburg festival was certainly of an international nature, including leading composers such as Holst, Falla, Kodály, Dohnányi, Sibelius and Kilpinen. The festival held in Vichy in September 1935 coincided exactly with the ISCM in Prague, and has been analysed in some detail by Anne Shreffler, who argues that the programme committee ‘had made little attempt to focus on contemporary music’, since all works were at least five years old. ²⁵³ But this is a minor point, as five years was not that long a time in terms of new music history, and many works which would have been more shocking were written back in the 1920s. The festival was again strikingly multinational, if somewhat conservative in its choice of composers, a pattern which continued in subsequent years.

In February 1936, Reznicek oversaw the passing of a resolution affirming that a primary task of the council was ‘the promotion of musical exchange among the Nations with particular consideration for the representative, national works of living composers, without regard to any particular [stylistic] orientation or one-sided tendencies’ (emphasis original). This managed to portray the organization as open in nature in comparison to the ISCM. A further resolution said that works from a particular country could only be performed at the institution’s concerts if they had been nominated or agreed by a delegate from the composer’s country. ²⁵⁴ After Reznicek developed links with and support from Hinkel and the Reichskulturkammer, Jewish composers were mostly removed. Gerigk made barbed comments at the 1938 festival about how the council was judenfrei (see Figure 7), while on the other hand Jewish people played a significant role in Belgian musical life.²⁵⁵ After 1942, the organization was renamed the Internationale Komponisten-Verband, affirming a ‘supranational’ (übernational), rather than an international, view of music.²⁵⁶

Figure 7 List of members of the council of the Ständiger Rat, from the programme booklet for its Frankfurt festival in 1939.

The three principal festivals present different models of nationalism and programming: the ADMV was national with an occasionally internationalist flavour; the Baden-Baden festival was indeed more truly multinational and cosmopolitical, without any strong domination of any one country; whereas the Ständiger Rat’s festivals were ones of multiple, often aggressive nationalisms (combined with German domination) – in pointed opposition to, above all, transnational modernism – which were associated (through a very narrow reading) with the ISCM. None of the festivals, however, made any serious moves to extend internationalism beyond the boundaries of Europe.

Conclusion: post-war implications

Despite the large number of internationally focused musical events through the history of Nazi Germany, one should not overestimate the proportion of musical life in general which they represent. Events such as the Berliner Kunstwochen in April–June 1935, May–June 1936 and subsequently were almost exclusively dominated by German music, ²⁵⁷ as was the programming of most orchestras, while the eight series of concerts presented by the Berliner Konzertgemeinde in 1938–9 included scarcely any non-German artists. ²⁵⁸ Nineteenth- and some early twentieth-century Italian opera continued to be prominent in most German opera houses, but still no more so than German works. Surveys published in Die Musik and the Zeitschrift für Musik of various types of programming between 1940 and 1943 showed an overwhelming majority of German music despite a reasonable representation of that of other countries. ²⁵⁹

Nonetheless, the data I have collated shows how the rhetoric of Nachholbedarf was in many ways misleading and one-sided. It is true that certain music was systematically excluded, most obviously that of Jewish composers, but not necessarily all other varieties of international or even modernist music. Without this ideology, though, a wide range of promoters might not have gained the traction required to secure support and sometimes funding for a whole range of new music festivals. This was certainly not the only factor, as one must also take into account the aims of the various occupying powers to promote the music from their own countries. ²⁶⁰

Post-war programming in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s maintained a degree of internationalism at first focused upon distinct national traditions – mirroring the programming of the ISCM – then moving away from this. This allowed for forms of modernism which did not appear to have obvious or explicit national roots, as in the Weimar era, but these did not attain any type of prominence, let alone domination, until the 1960s at the earliest (and even then only in certain institutions). Many German concert series, festivals, radio programmes and critical writings continued for some time to group compositions by nation state, with internationalist modernism (represented in the 1950s by serialism and various forms of electronic music; and towards the end of the decade by the textural composition of Xenakis, Penderecki and Ligeti and the emergence of a new type of experimental music theatre) remaining on the relative periphery. ²⁶¹ In many ways, the consolidation of an internationalist or transnationalist outlook was slower in the post-war era than it had been in Weimar Germany. Nonetheless, the ideological conditions that allowed this gradual trajectory to occur were firmly rooted in responses to an at least partially imaginary immediate past.