The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  IV

  Alfred Rosenberg’s declining influence in the cultural sphere during the mid-1930s could not rescue the most excoriated and most defamed form of music under the Third Reich, namely jazz. Regarded by the Nazis as degenerate, foreign to German musical identity, associated with all kinds of decadence, and produced by racially inferior African-Americans and Jews, jazz, swing and other forms of popular music were stamped on as soon as the Nazis came to power. Foreign jazz musicians left or were expelled, and in 1935 German popular musicians were banned from using the foreign pseudonyms that had been so fashionable under the Weimar Republic. Jazz clubs, tolerated to a degree in the first year or so of the regime, began to be raided more frequently, and by larger numbers of agents from the Gestapo and the Reich Music Chamber, who intimidated the musicians by calling to see the papers that certified their membership of the Chamber, and by confiscating their scores if they were playing music by blacklisted Jewish composers such as Irving Berlin. Tight control over radio broadcasts made sure that light music did not swing too much, and the newspapers announced with a fanfare of publicity that ‘Nigger music’ had been banned from the airwaves altogether. Brownshirts patrolled summer beaches frequented by young people with portable wind-up gramophones and kicked their fragile shellac jazz records to smithereens. Classical composers whose music made use of jazz rhythms, such as the young Karl Amadeus Hartmann, found their music totally proscribed. Unable to make a living in Germany, but unwilling to leave, Hartmann depended for an income entirely on concerts and recordings abroad, where his identification with critics of the Third Reich put him in a situation of considerable potential risk. His wealthy and influential friends and relatives, mostly alienated from the regime, kept him afloat. His music made no compromises with the Third Reich’s demands for simplicity and straightforwardness, and he went out of his way to distance it still further by taking composition lessons with the most extreme of Schönberg’s modernist pupils, Anton von Webern. Hartmann took great care to avoid publicity, and his outward conformity with the regime in matters such as the Hitler salute warded off suspicion. When he dedicated a symphonic poem to his friends, dead and alive, who had been imprisoned in the concentration camp at Dachau, he made sure that the dedication was only visible on the original score, seen only by the conductor, a personal friend, at its first performance in Prague in 1935; it never became known to the Nazis.227

  Jazz rhythms in classical music could easily be spotted and damned as inappropriate. But much if not most popular music was neither classical nor jazz, but existed somewhere in between, whether in the form of operettas - much favoured by Hitler himself - or the music of café crooners, palm-court orchestras or dance bands. The kind of popular music that was played in dance-halls, nightclubs, hotel bars and similar venues, above all in Berlin, was far more difficult to control, not least because of the extreme difficulty of drawing a clear line between what was jazz or swing, and what was not. The often wealthy and upper-class young people who patronized many such places were usually able to ward off hostile attention from agents of the Gestapo or the Reich Music Chamber. Imported jazz records could always be purchased discreetly from back-street shops, while even Goebbels was conscious enough of the popularity of jazz and swing to allow some to reach the airwaves in late-night broadcasts. And if it could not be heard on German radio stations, then jazz could always be found on Radio Luxemburg, where, Goebbels feared, listeners might also encounter factual broadcasts of a politically undesirable kind. Goebbels himself was a long-time patron of the variety shows at Berlin’s Scala, where an audience of 3,000 not only gazed at the famous, high-kicking chorus line but also listened to the music of proscribed composers such as the Jewish-American George Gershwin. Goebbels was taken aback when criticisms of this programme appeared in Julius Streicher’s The Stormer in May 1937, and with good reason. The managers had been changing the programme whenever Goebbels’s staff telephoned in advance to say that he would be in the audience, so that it would not contain anything to offend Nazi taste after he arrived. He went ahead and purged the management all the same, enforcing on it a programme his deputy was soon describing as ‘tame’.228

  Jazz and swing were suspect to the regime not least because it thought they encouraged sexual licentiousness among the young. It also came under pressure from professional ballroom dancing instructors, who wanted to scotch the threat of swing-dancing, a new fad that had come into fashion in the summer of 1937. The Hitler Youth frowned on swing too, preferring to champion German folk dancing. Local authorities soon began to impose bans on this new fashion. Pouring scorn on such stuffiness, the gilded youth of Hamburg’s wealthy mercantile and professional elite quickly began to flaunt their disdain in public, dressing up in the latest and most elegant British fashion clothes, sporting Union Jacks, carrying copies of The Times under their arms and greeting each other in English with phrases such as ‘Hallo, Old Swing Boy!’ In clubs and bars, and at private parties, they danced to swing music and played jazz records banned by the regime. They did not intend to mount a political protest. But under the Third Reich, everything was political. The young swingers crossed a significant line when, in 1937, they decided to defy the Hitler Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach’s ordinance of 1 December 1936 proclaiming that all young Germans should join his organization. More seriously, the free-and-easy social mixing of Jews, half-Jews and non-Jews in the social scene of the swingers was crassly at odds with the dictates of the regime’s racial policy. What had begun as an act of adolescent cultural wilfulness was rapidly becoming a manifestation of political protest. It would take on more serious dimensions during the war.229

  The confusion and irrationality of Nazi policy towards music, where definitions were often arbitrary and acceptance or rejection frequently a matter of whim, can be neatly illustrated by the history of the humble mouth-organ, an instrument in whose world production Germany was absolutely dominant in the 1920s. In the mid-to-late 1920s, German exports of mouth-organs, or harmonicas, accounted for 88 per cent of the world export trade in the instrument as a whole. Within this trade, the Hohner company, in the small Swabian town of Trossingen, had the lion’s share, producing between 20 and 22 million mouth-organs a year in this period, more than half the total. Almost all of these went to the United States. By this time, many markets had been virtually saturated, and the world economic crisis was depressing demand. So the company had to look to boosting its sales within Germany as a substitute. Unfortunately, the conservative classical music establishment took a very dim view of the instrument, considering it vulgar and amateurish. Their representatives succeeded in getting the harmonica banned from Prussian schools in 1931. The Hohner family riposted with an American-style advertising campaign, with pictures of the German heavyweight boxer Max Schmeling blowing away on his harmonica, and combined this with a counter-attack to try and persuade the musical world that their instrument was not subversive. After the Nazi seizure of power, Ernst Hohner, though in no way a convinced National Socialist, joined the Party to try and gain influence, and campaigned for the harmonica on the basis that it was an important part of folk music, played by ordinary, simple folk, and ideal for brownshirts and Hitler Youth parties to play as they sat swapping patriotic reminiscences round the camp fire.230

  But this tactic was not successful. For one thing, folk music only took up 2.5 per cent of broadcasting time anyway. Then the Reich Music Chamber, still in many ways dominated by traditionalists, took the view that the harmonica was a modern instrument and not traditionally German at all, and pointed to its use by some jazz groups, surely damning evidence of its unsuitability. The Hitler Youth banned harmonica groups, though it still allowed individuals to play the instrument. A total ban in the long run seemed to be more than likely. But in the end, nobody seemed to know quite how to categorize the instrument, or perhaps even to care very much about it. Hohner and his firm were able to continue in existence, even running a school for mouth-organists in their home-town of Trossingen,
in the ultimately vain hope that the harmonica would eventually gain the status of other, more conventional musical instruments. Here too, therefore, regulation, control, and in-fighting within the world of music ended by producing a stalemate. In the end, even the humble mouth-organ defied easy categorization within the world of Nazi ideology.231

  V

  Of all modern regimes that of the Third Reich defined itself most clearly by its art and mass culture. Hitler devoted more space in his speeches to these subjects than did any other twentieth-century dictator. 232 Of course, the Nazis borrowed a great deal from the rituals and symbols of Fascist Italy; and the disciplining of individual human bodies into a single, monolithic mass was a characteristic of Stalin’s Russia as much as it was of Franco’s Spain. All these regimes reduced the arts to instruments of propaganda and eliminated any sign of creative dissent, or at least tried to. They cracked down on complex and elitist aspects of modernist cultural productions and attempted to force on artists, writers and musicians a simple style that could communicate itself easily to the masses. Socialist realism in the Soviet Union was in many ways a parallel to what one might call racist and nationalist realism in the Third Reich. As the propaganda campaigns of the early 1930s had shown, well before Hitler came to power, the appeal to the emotions in sight and sound was a potent political weapon, and all political groupings, even the staid Social Democrats, had sought to exploit it, believing that in the age of the masses, the rational, verbal, intellectual appeal of previous ages was no longer enough. Under the Third Reich, the weapon of cultural propaganda was made into an instrument of state power, just as it was in Stalin’s Russia. Artists and writers are by their nature individualistic, and both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany waged an unremitting war on individualism, proclaiming art’s only acceptable function to be the expression of the soul of the masses. Music proved the most difficult of the arts to control in both regimes, with composers such as Prokoviev and Shostakovich continuing to produce works in a very personal idiom despite occasional attempts to discipline them and periodic gestures of compromise on their part towards the cultural dictates of their political masters. In architecture, the style favoured by Troost, Speer and their ilk did little more than repeat the common features of the public building design of the age across Europe and the United States, only on a larger scale. Hitler’s hostility to cultural modernism was extreme and contrasted with the more relaxed attitude of the Italian Fascists, one of whose main ideological sources had been the artistic politics of the Futurists. An Italian Futurist exhibition held in Berlin in 1934 aroused the disapproval of Nazi art commentators, who were bold enough to comment that they did not want to see such ‘art bolshevism’ again, despite the fact that the artists had declared themselves for Fascism. But looking back on the buildings of Speer, the sculptures of Breker, the music of Egk, or the films of Riefenstahl, it is clear that Nazi culture was recognizably part of the culture of its time. It belonged unmistakably to the 1930s; it was not a throwback to some earlier age.233 In all these respects, the Third Reich’s approach to culture and the arts was far from unique.234

  And yet there was also something special about it. Of course, it was not surprising, in view of his early life and ambitions, that Hitler took a personal interest in the visual arts. His constantly repeated diatribes against modernism were surely the key factor in swinging policy away from Goebbels’s relatively relaxed point of view and towards the effective suppression of modernism in all its varieties from 1937 onwards. But it would be illegitimate to conclude from this that he personally dictated cultural policy in every other area as well.235 Apart from a passion for Wagner, he had little real interest in or understanding of music, whose essential abstraction in any case resisted easy classification into the acceptable and the unacceptable from the Nazi point of view; even the enthusiasm he developed towards the end of the 1930s for the music of Anton Bruckner was in the end rather half-hearted. Despite his penchant for watching old movies late at night, and his commissioning of Leni Riefenstahl to shoot Triumph of the Will, he did not intervene much in the film business, which was largely left to Goebbels, as were radio and literature. In all these areas, Goebbels had to contend with many rivals, most notably of course Alfred Rosenberg, but despite all the in-fighting, he achieved effective control for his Propaganda Ministry fairly early on in the regime, by the first months of 1935 at the latest. It would be easy to emphasize the complexities and contradictions of cultural life under the Third Reich, and indeed there were always marginal cases with whom the Nazis found it difficult to deal, and other cases where their decisions seemed almost entirely arbitrary and in retrospect might have gone either way. Artists, writers, musicians and others adopted a variety of strategies to deal with Nazi cultural dictatorship, ranging from total compliance through what they conceived of as necessary, minimal compromises in the interest of their art, to inner emigration and even complete silence, which was not always forced by the regime. Normal cultural life was not, despite the fears of many, totally extinguished under the Third Reich. People could still listen to symphonies by Beethoven, view the paintings of the Old Masters in state-funded art galleries, read the literature of the classics, even in some places visit jazz clubs and dance-halls where the latest swing numbers were played. For his part, Goebbels was a subtle enough politician to realize that people needed to escape from their everyday troubles in these ways, and allowed them the latitude to do so.236

  For all this, however, the situation of the arts in the Third Reich was still determined by a cultural dictatorship imposed from above. As the Degenerate Art exhibition showed, aesthetic and stylistic considerations were only a relatively minor determining factor in Nazi cultural policy. More important were political and ideological imperatives. Whatever the arts of the past had done, the Nazis wanted to ensure that what was produced in the present did not oppose their fundamental values and wherever possible worked to support them. Antisemitism, the removal of Jews from cultural life, the furthering of militarism and the crushing of pacifism and social criticism were basic tenets of Nazi cultural policy. So too were the improvement of the Aryan race and the suppression of the unfit and the weak, the re-creation of a mythical world of ‘blood-and-soil’ peasant life, the destruction of creativity that was personal and independent and the furthering of an impersonal cultural production that served the collective needs of the nation and the race. Above all, perhaps, Nazi culture glorified power, most obviously in architecture. Racial and political discrimination, implemented from the outset, resulted in the emigration from Germany of the country’s best and most internationally acclaimed writers, painters and musicians. Those who were left were silenced, driven into irrelevance, forced to compromise, or enlisted in the service of the Nazis’ overriding purpose: to make the nation and the country fit and ready for war.237 To this end, the Nazis made an unprecedented effort to bring what they understood as culture to the masses, distributing cheap radios, holding concerts in factories, taking films to remote villages in mobile cinemas, bussing people to view the horrors of the Degenerate Art exhibition and much more besides. Culture in the Third Reich was no longer the privilege of an elite; it was intended to penetrate every area of German society and German life.238

  Nazi cultural policy was ultimately of a piece with Nazi policy in other areas, and shared its contradictions. Hitler’s own appreciation and understanding of the arts was fundamentally a political one. Art was in the end to be reduced to little more than a celebration of power and an instrument of propaganda. Ever alive to possible accusations of this kind, Goebbels declared on 17 June 1935:The National Socialist movement . . . takes the view that politics is actually the greatest and noblest of the arts. For just as the sculptor chisels out of dead stone a form that breathes life, and just as the painter transforms pigment into life, and just as the composer translates dead notes into melodies that will charm Heaven, so the politician and statesman has no other task than to convert an amorphous mass into a living peo
ple. Thus art and politics belong together.239