The Third Reich at War (96 page)

Jazz and swing were not just used by the regime for its own purposes, they became expressions of opposition to it as well. In Hamburg, the well-off ‘Swing Youth’ of the prewar years were not deterred from holding dances and parties by the mere outbreak of a war. Early in 1940 the Gestapo discovered 500 of them swinging away in a dance-hall in an Altona hotel to the sound of English music, even with English lyrics. The next time this happened, the police were prepared. On 2 March 1940 forty Gestapo agents raided another dance, in the Curio-Haus in the city’s university quarter, locked the doors and fingerprinted 408 participants, all but seventeen of them under the age of twenty-one. Further public dances had to be cancelled, but the gilded youth of Hamburg continued their partying in private. Until December 1941 they gathered in the Waterloo cinema near the Dammtor railway station to watch American films, with the young Axel Springer, a future newspaper publisher, acting as projectionist. As the police became more intrusive, the Swing Youth retreated to the plush suburban villas of their parents, where they celebrated in the cellars in what the Gestapo described disapprovingly as an ‘erotic ambience’. In June 1942 a summer party in one such villa included a cabaret with impersonations of Hitler and Goebbels. The Hitler Youth, who feared the Swing Youth as rivals to their own popularity, such as it was, sent spies to the party, and the cabarettist was arrested.

The arrogance and insouciance of the Swingers, their provocative dress, such as Hannelore Evers’s grey suit, man’s waistcoat and open jacket with shoulder-pads (‘an absolute knock-out,’ as one veteran of the Swing Youth recalled later), or Kurt-Rudolf Hoffmann’s habit of wearing the American flag on his lapel, combined with their open admiration of British style, were eventually reported to Himmler and Heydrich, who on 26 January 1942 ordered them to be arrested, beaten and put to work. Their parents were to be interrogated and sent to a concentration camp if it was found that they had encouraged the ‘Anglophiliac tendencies’ of their offspring. Within a few weeks, up to seventy Swingers had been arrested and sent to camps including Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen. There they were classified as political prisoners, though many denied they had acted out of political conviction. ‘We were long on hair and short on brains,’ one later confessed, and as for their habit of booing at the newsreel when they went to the cinema, one of them said they did it because ‘we were going to tell these dumb bastards that we were different, that’s all’. Yet the disregard for the regime’s racism that led a number of the Swing boys to carry on sexual relationships with Jewish girls, the hatred of the war some of them showed in their letters (intercepted by the Gestapo) and their open contempt for the Nazi leaders and the Hitler Youth, gave the Gestapo some reason to regard them as political. Many of the younger Swing boys were conscripted into the army after serving their time in a camp for juveniles, but at least three of them, according to their own later accounts, managed to avoid ever shooting at the enemy, and two of them crossed the lines and gave themselves up.
¹³⁸

IV

As the popularity of musical films and radio broadcasts suggests, musical life was initially relatively unaffected by the war.
¹³⁹
Escapist operas were popular on the stage as well as on the cinema screen: the most notable written during these years was Richard Strauss’s
Capriccio
(1942). Hitler himself had recently acquired a passion for the music of Anton Bruckner, whose manuscripts he planned to collect in the magnificent library at the vast Austrian monastery of St Florian, where Bruckner had played the organ and where his body was buried. The monastery was located near Hitler’s favourite town, Linz. Hitler had the monks summarily expelled ready for the building’s conversion to its new function. He paid for the restoration of the organ out of his personal funds and also subsidized the publication of the Haas edition of Bruckner’s collected works. He bought a number of additional items for the library, and had a Bruckner study centre set up at the monastery, also supporting it from his own coffers; it was intended in the long run to be the nucleus of a major music conservatory. Hitler prompted the foundation of a Bruckner Symphony Orchestra, which began playing concerts in the autumn of 1943. His design for a bell-tower in Linz that would play a theme from Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, the
Romantic
, was, however, never realized.
¹⁴⁰

Despite all this, there was ultimately, in Hitler’s view, still no substitute for Wagner. In 1940, on his way back from his brief visit to Paris, he called in at Bayreuth to attend a performance of
Twilight of the Gods
.

It was to be his last. Immersed in the conduct of the war, and increasingly reluctant to appear in public, he went to no more live musical performances after this. Yet he never lost his belief in the power of music. In the same year he established a ‘War Festival’ at Bayreuth, to which he invited - or forced the attendance of - specially chosen guests, 142,000 of them in all during the five years of the Festival. ‘The war,’ he reminisced in January 1942, ‘gave me the opportunity to fulfil a desire dear to Wagner’s heart: that men chosen amongst the people - workers and soldiers - should be able to attend his Festival free of charge.’
¹⁴¹
By 1943,
Twilight of the Gods
no longer seemed appropriate, in view of the rapidly deteriorating military situation, and, after consulting with Winifred Wagner, Hitler had it replaced by
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
at the remaining two Festivals. In his own quarters, he had stopped listening to Wagner altogether after Stalingrad, and sought escape in
The Merry Widow
, his favourite operetta, by Franz Leha’r, conveniently disregarding the fact that the librettist was Jewish, as indeed was Le’har’s own wife.
¹⁴²

Bayreuth and its festivals always occupied something of an anomalous place in the Third Reich, not least because they were in practice run by the Wagner family in direct consultation with Hitler, whereas other aspects of German musical life all fell under the aegis of the Reich Chamber of Music and therefore Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. In 1940 the Ministry claimed that there were 181 permanent orchestras at work in the Reich, employing a total of 8,918 musicians.
¹⁴³
They had to adapt themselves to wartime conditions, playing in munitions factories and appearing at charity events for the troops. Political considerations continued to trump the regime’s general hostility to musical modernism; the fact that Hungary was an ally of Germany, for instance, allowed the Munich Philharmonic under its conductor Osvald Kabasta to play Be’la Barto’k’s
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste
in concert in 1942, although the composer himself had never wanted his music to be performed in Nazi Germany (he had by this time gone into exile in the USA). But political considerations also entailed - or offered an opportunity to orchestras to set out on - tours of occupied countries, spreading German culture and proselytizing for German music. The repertoire was heavily German, with the music of Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner taking pride of place amongst living composers. Conductors such as Eugen Jochum, Hans Knappertsbusch and younger men like Herbert von Karajan and Karl Böhm ensured that standards were maintained until the destruction of concert halls and opera houses and the drafting of players and administrators into the armed forces began to take their toll from 1943 onwards. Böhm did his career no harm by giving the Nazi salute from the podium at the start of his concerts, while Karajan, a member of the Nazi Party since 1933, benefited from the fact that he was considered politically more reliable than the senior figure he began to rival for concert-goers’ affections during the war, Wilhelm Furtwängler.
¹⁴⁴

Hitler remained, however, a fan of Furtwängler (‘the only conductor whose gestures do not appear ridiculous,’ he said in 1942, ‘is Furtwängler’).
¹⁴⁵
Such approval further cemented Furtwängler’s commitment to the Third Reich: indeed, on 13 January 1944 Goebbels wrote in his diary: ‘To my pleasure I find that with Furtwängler the worse things go for us, the more he supports our regime.’
¹⁴⁶
During the war, Furtwängler became a kind of court conductor to the Nazi elite. He took an orchestra to Norway a week before the German invasion in 1940, an event described by the German Embassy in Oslo, which knew that German forces were about to launch an attack on the country, as ‘very suited to awaken and animate sympathy for German art and for Germany’. In 1942 he conducted a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for Hitler’s birthday. All of this he did voluntarily. His conservative nationalism kept him in the Reich until January 1945, when he encountered Albert Speer in a concert interval. ‘You look so very tired, maestro,’ said Speer with a knowing look: perhaps, he suggested, it would be a good idea to stay in Switzerland after a forthcoming concert and not come back. Furtwängler took the hint and did not return.
¹⁴⁷

Many people who went to his concerts, or more generally listened to music on the radio, were, as Furtwängler pointed out after the war, thereby enabled to take refuge for a while in a world of higher spiritual values than those purveyed by the Nazis. Yet music’s significance could vary enormously according to who was playing it or listening to it. ‘When I hear Beethoven,’ wrote one journalist in a radio magazine in 1942, for example, ‘I become brave.’
¹⁴⁸
A woman who attended the War Festival in Bayreuth in 1943 reported that the performance had given her ‘fresh courage and strength for the work to come’.
¹⁴⁹
Local townspeople in Bayreuth, by contrast, found the opulence of the Festival abhorrent. Seeing a group of War Festival guests drinking cognac, a group of soldiers agreed: ‘There you see it again: we’re always the stupid ones.’
¹⁵⁰
The spectacle was particularly annoying for people who had been bombed out of their homes. ‘These shits,’ said one of them, observing the guests at the theatre restaurant, ‘gobble and glug themselves up to the brim here, while those of us who’ve lost everything don’t get a single drop of wine to drink.’
¹⁵¹
Even outside Bayreuth, people were reported to be complaining about the resources devoted to the Festival at a time when everybody was being exhorted to live frugally: the hard-pressed rail service was forced to transport 30,000 people to Bayreuth, many of them given leave from their jobs in munitions factories for the best part of a week.
¹⁵²
For those who attended, however, the Festival seemed a gift from Hitler of almost incredible generosity. Their expressions of gratitude were recorded at suitable length in the Security Service report. Yet for most of them, it was only a brief, if welcome, break. Music in the abstract has very little to do with life; and in listening to it, opera- and concert-goers were taking the very route of escapism that Goebbels had laid down for them. As one of the munitions workers who attended the Bayreuth Festival in 1943 confessed: ‘After the curtain went down, we were unable to find the way back to reality for ourselves at all quickly.’
¹⁵³
Many others must have felt the same.

The Third Reich’s record of producing new music of its own was far from convincing. Richard Strauss was undoubtedly the best-known German composer during the Third Reich, but the Nazis took particular exception to the fact that his son had married a woman whom they classified as Jewish. In 1938, when Austria, where he and his family were domiciled, was incorporated into the Reich, stormtroopers specifically targeted his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice in the pogrom of 9- 10 November 1938, harassing her mercilessly and raiding her house. Strauss’s protests and his good relations with Baldur von Schirach, the Regional Leader of Vienna, a personal friend of the Strauss family through his upbringing as the son of a theatre director in Weimar, bore some fruit, but the composer was unable to prevent Alice’s grandmother from being deported to Theresienstadt. Strauss drove up in his limousine to the camp gates, where he grandly announced: ‘I am the composer Richard Strauss.’ Sceptical guards turned him away. The grandmother died, along with twenty-five other Jewish relatives of Strauss’s daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, at Goebbels’s prompting, the Gestapo raided Alice’s home and took her off to interrogation with her husband, whom they put under pressure to divorce her. He stood firm. Repeated letters from the composer to Himmler and others failed to achieve clarity about the inheritance that he wished to pass on to his half-Jewish grandsons. Strauss was still the most frequently performed living opera composer in Germany in 1942, but he lived under straitened circumstances, he was no longer - unlike some other prominent musicians - privileged by the regime, and he had to contend with the constant threat to the life of his daughter-in-law and his grandsons.
¹⁵⁴

The true nature of the composer’s relationship with the regime was brutally revealed at a meeting of leading composers with Goebbels on 28 February 1941, at which Strauss attempted to persuade the Propaganda Minister to rescind a recent decision to reduce copyright payments to serious composers in favour of rewarding the writers of more frequently performed light music like that of Hitler’s favourite Franz Leha’r, whose work Strauss dismissed out of hand, with something like their full income. Goebbels had an incriminating sentence from Strauss’s letter to his librettist Stefan Zweig of 17 June 1933, criticizing the regime, read out loud, then shouted at Strauss: ‘Be quiet, and take note that you have no idea of who you are and who I am! Leha’r has the masses, you don’t! Stop babbling about the significance of serious music! This will not revalue your stock! Tomorrow’s culture is different from that of yesterday! You, Herr Strauss, are of yesterday!’
¹⁵⁵
In 1943, Strauss got into further trouble because he refused to accommodate evacuees in his home. When he refused again the following year, Goebbels tried to have his operas banned. He was overruled by Hitler. But the composer’s eightieth birthday in June was studiously ignored by the regime and the Party. He had become something of an unperson.