Forbidden Music (41 page)
Authors: Michael Haas
Jews, such as Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, were not allowed to conduct for so-called ‘security reasons’, spurious excuses made along the lines that the public and musicians would no longer tolerate Jewish conductors, singers and instrumentalists and, therefore, ‘their safety could not be guaranteed’. It was just an extension of Nazi double-speak – similar excuses were made for the official boycott of Jewish shops and professional services on 1 April 1933, when it was claimed that if the boycott had not been officially sanctioned, it would have been carried out by a mob and public safety would have been at risk.
Mass resignations of conductors were demanded: Josef Rosenstock in Mannheim, Jascha Horenstein in Düsseldorf, and Fritz Stiedry in Berlin; Otto Klemperer's Staatsoper contract was torn up by the same man who had made Hans Gál's
Heilige Ente
such a success with Maria Schreker only a few years before – Heinz Tietjen – though it was the same Heinz Tietjen who put on Zemlinsky's
Kreidekreis
the following year. Gustav Brecher, Director of the opera in Leipzig who had premiered both Krenek's
Jonny spielt auf
and Kurt Weill's
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
, was forced out of Leipzig after having a performance of Weill's
Der Silbersee
interrupted in March 1933. He and his wife committed suicide in Ostend in 1940 as Belgium fell to the Nazis. Non-Jews also protested, resigned and left the country, including Erich Kleiber, Fritz Busch, Karl Rankl, the opera director Carl Ebert, the theatre director Josef Gielen (father of Michael Gielen), and the composers Robert Stolz and Ralph Benatzky.
It was just as Lady Oxford had predicted to Rosenberg: Germany was haemorrhaging its most important intellects and talents. What was happening in music was being replicated in academia, the law and medicine. Jewish doctors were rounded up and thrown out of hospitals, and patients who allowed themselves to be operated on by Jewish surgeons were themselves subject to persecution. These were not the ‘minor injustices’ that Rosenberg spoke of, but major outrages that would damage the country for generations. What this meant in practical terms for music is explained by Viktor Zuckerkandl, writing from Berlin in July 1933:
It is a remarkable phenomenon, that the general movement that is currently sweeping across Germany and is the fruit of a younger generation of
politicians has not succeeded in establishing equivalent young voices to achieve similar breakthroughs in music. After all, when all is said and done, music must ultimately be considered the most characteristic means of national self-expression. But, in fact, it appears that the opposite is more the case. The men we see coming forward today were all born in the 1890s and hail from older generations, if not perhaps in actual age, then certainly in attitude: stolid bourgeois taste resulting in worthy Romantic expression has been the trend. We're treated to picture-book scenes from the countryside of yore, rich with the naïve joy of kitschy costumes and trite sets. We are reaching back to the times of Richard Strauss and Pfitzner. It's not difficult to understand what drives this counter-revolution against rationalist trends that have dominated music in Germany for the past two decades. Perhaps the criticism that modern German music has too assiduously avoided direct association with its forests and fields, or even its own folk traditions is legitimate, at least if compared with Slavic and Latin cultures. If we recall the many new forms that have resulted from this most recent revolution in the political sphere, it is astonishing that such ambitions for new beginnings are totally missing within music. Of course, the truly ‘new’ can only come about as an act of genius, and the present trend of reaching into the past is mere compensation for having nothing original to say.
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Zuckerkandl's last sentence offers an eerie, if unintentional echo of Wagner's comments on Jewish composers.
Furtwängler
On 12 April, reports appeared in the
Neue Freie Presse
of an appeal to Goebbels made by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler with the heading ‘There is only good and bad art’:
Furtwängler has presented an appeal to the Propaganda Minister Dr Joseph Goebbels in which he places his entire authority upon the belief that in Germany, much that is presently taking place has absolutely nothing to do with the restoration of the nation's cultural heritage. Furtwängler is dismayed that ‘lines are being drawn between the confessional persuasions of individuals’ – even in circumstances where this must have little or no bearing on professional and state affairs. According to Furtwängler: ‘rather than drawing a division between confessions, one should draw it between good and bad art. This is the only line that should not be crossed and should be the only line that we heed. Musical life has been damaged already by both
the world financial crisis and the advent of the radio – it cannot bear further social experiments. If nothing worthwhile can be offered in concerts, the public simply turns away. Questions of quality are not just questions of aspirations and ideals, but become questions of our very existence as musicians. Of course one should fight the destructive kitsch that is rootless, dry and soulless; but it can never be in the interest of our cultural life to turn this fight against real artists. It has to be said very clearly that men such as Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Max Reinhardt are necessary for the future cultural life in Germany and must be allowed to continue to have their say.’
Goebbels's response was that ‘there is not only the dividing line between good and bad art, but the only art that can be considered good is that which springs from the eternal well deep inside the people and this art must also
mean
something to these people’. Dr Goebbels takes the view that true German artists have been forcibly silenced over the past fourteen years, though he conceded that mistakes had perhaps been made and wrote that ‘any true artist need not worry about his position’. It is to be understood that Goebbels is expressing polite respect towards Furtwängler rather than any actual intention of rectifying previous excesses. Reading between the lines, one may, however, sense a hint of an admission that perhaps they have on occasion been over-zealous.
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The article goes on to list the many German scientists and doctors who would be without employment under the conditions dictated by the new regime and makes the point that 20 per cent of Germany's Nobel Prize winners would also find themselves unemployed. The journalist then turns to a quote by the Nazi minister Hermann Göring, which he follows with an analysis by the conservative German press:
[Göring:] ‘It is impossible to build a Reich that is both large and glorious if groups within our nation are reduced to slavery. With a cowed people, or where millions feel themselves to be excluded, it is not possible to inspire a country to historic deeds.’ The
Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung
, a paper from the political right, expresses the fear that the new Reich is being built on feelings and instincts and not, as with previous governments, on reason: ‘It can only lead to intolerable uniformity of Germany's political and intellectual life, a feat that the rest of the world would gaze upon with open mouths. In our opinion,’ [the
ADZ
] continues, ‘this contributes just as little to the work that still needs to be done during these dangerous times as playing lovey-dovey to Hitler's enemies from earlier days.’ [The
ADZ
] goes on to despair of the cowardly resignation, the byzantine lack of tact in all dealings
and the total absence of cultivation and civil courage. The appeal of Furtwängler, however, reminds us that there is still to be found within the German people the bravery that does not quake at the foot of the thrones of kings. It would be a true blessing if it were on these foundations of past ideals that a country's history was being inspired.
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Goebbels represented a more nuanced and ambivalent view, that the public should decide for itself if it liked atonal, dissonant music, just so long as it was not of Jewish authorship. To this end, Erich Kleiber conducted Alban Berg's
Lulu Suite
at Berlin's Staatsoper in December 1934. During the Nazi years, more stridently modernist music was occasionally tolerated; even more rarely – as with Klenau's opera
Michael Kohlhaas
– it would be promoted as part of Goebbels's propaganda attempts to portray National Socialism as progressive.
Who's a Jew?
The removal of Jews and their works from the repertoire meant breaking countless contracts which would have led to costly court actions. To circumvent this, a law called ‘The Re-establishment of the Professional Civil Service’ was passed on 7 April 1933 barring Jews from any publicly subsidised position unless they could prove that they had fought on the front in the First World War – an exception that enabled the Jewish composer and conductor Leo Blech to remain in his position as Music Director of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden until 1937. This law hit orchestras, opera houses and theatres particularly hard, and it was in direct response to this that Furtwängler addressed his appeal to Goebbels on 12 April. The Städtische Oper in Berlin-Charlottenburg, the venue for many of Berlin's most important premieres such as Schreker's
Der Schmied von Gent
, Weill's
Die Bürgschaft
and Gál's
Die heilige Ente
, lost its founding music director Ignaz Waghalter, its conductor Fritz Stiedry, its assistant conductors and pianists Berthold Goldschmidt and Kurt Sanderling, and its chief administrator, Rudolf Bing. Waghalter fled first to Czechoslovakia, then to the United States. Carl Ebert and Bing resigned and moved to England, where they took on the management of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Goldschmidt followed in 1935 in the mistaken belief that Ebert would be able to find him a position, and hopeful that, following a BBC broadcast of Berg's
Wozzeck
, he might find opportunities no longer afforded to modern Jewish composers in Germany. Kurt Sanderling took the courageous decision to go the Soviet Union, where he miraculously avoided the purges of 1938 and later became one of Shostakovich's closest associates.
Much stricter legislation would soon come into force. The notorious ‘Nuremberg Laws’ were announced at the Nazi Party Conference in Nuremberg in September 1935. The laws were designed to protect German blood and prohibited ‘inter-racial’ sexual relationships and marriage. Those who could not prove their pure Aryan lineage were stripped of fundamental rights, which would soon progress from the profoundly distressing, such as losing all means of employment, to the petty and mean-spirited, such as not being allowed in public parks or attending entertainments held in public venues. In August 1938, a law was passed that required all men and women of Jewish descent to take a common middle name that would instantly identify them as Jews. For men this name was ‘Israel’, and for women ‘Sarah’. These regulations spread from region to region as each tried to outdo the others in finding new means to isolate and humiliate German Jews.
With the annexation of Austria, the full fury of Austrian Nazi frustration unleashed a blood bath. What had taken five years to carry out in Germany was accomplished in a matter of months in Austria. The extreme brutality caused a wave of suicides among Jews with no foreign connections to help them escape. Even well-known figures were affected, such as the cultural historian and writer Egon Friedell, who leapt to his death from a window when he believed Nazis were storming his apartment building.
Nazi laws would extinguish Austria's literary identity. The annexation would be the last nail in the coffin of the depressive and alcoholic writer Joseph Roth, who died in Paris in 1939. Robert Musil died in Swiss exile in 1942, the same year that Stefan Zweig and his wife jointly committed suicide in Brazil. The works of writers who had died before the annexation, such as Karl Kraus in 1936, Franz Kafka in 1924, Rainer Maria Rilke in 1926, Arthur Schnitzler in 1931 and Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1929, were taken out of circulation and even burned, though Hofmannsthal, as Strauss's librettist, was treated more lightly than others despite his Jewish ancestry.
On 22 September1933, the Nazis created the Reichskulturkammer (RKK) or the Reich's Chamber of Culture under Goebbels as a means of foiling the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF) or the German Workers’ Front, organised under Robert Ley. The DAF had been set up as a National Socialist umbrella organisation for German workers after the disbanding of all Weimar Republic trade unions in 1933. Under Ley's guidance, it had begun encouraging professionals and employees involved in the arts and culture to join. But this was an area that Goebbels saw as very much his own. Goebbels's RKK consisted of seven subdivisions, represented by the usual artistic disciplines of ‘written word’, ‘music’ and the ‘visual arts’, but also extending to the press and broadcasting. Beneath these were representatives of Germany's 31 districts. The RKK division
devoted to music was called the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK – Reich Chamber of Musical Affairs), initially with Richard Strauss as its president and Wilhelm Furtwängler as his deputy. In fact, the 69-year-old Strauss had been appointed without his acceptance even being sought, but believing his new-found influence might help his Jewish in-laws and be useful to other musicians and friends, he complied and took up the post without further question. It looked as if there was a glimmer of hope that some sense of restorative balance might be brought to the racist fanaticism that dominated all other aspects of Nazi cultural policy.
Both appointments proved to be short-lived. Strauss was replaced by the more hard-line Peter Raabe in 1935 following Strauss's collaboration with Stefan Zweig on
Die schweigsame Frau
. The ubiquitous Paul Graener took over from Furtwängler as early as 1934 after Furtwängler publicly expressed support for Hindemith's opera
Mathis der Maler
and resigned from the RMK in protest at its banning. The purpose of the RMK was to provide support for composers and performers, protect their interests and offer a minimum of social security. Under Strauss's short presidency, the one position that was markedly improved was, unsurprisingly, that of copyright protection, which was extended to fifty years after a composer's death.
