This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.
It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode The Art of Fear: The music of oppression and war.
Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Rest is Noise was his first book and garnered huge critical acclaim and a number of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of Listen to This.
DEATH FUGUE
Music in Hitler’s Germany
From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
Contents
Suggested Listening and Reading
About the Publisher
Music in Hitler’s Germany
Classical music was one of the few subjects, along with children and dogs, that brought out a certain tenderness in Adolf Hitler. In 1934, when the new leader of Germany appeared at a Wagner commemoration in Leipzig, observers noted that he spoke with “tears in his voice”—a phrase that appears infrequently in Max Domarus’s twenty-three-hundred-page edition of the Führer’s utterances. The previous year Hitler saluted the first Nuremberg Party Congress with a quotation from Wagner’s Meistersinger—“Wach’ auf!” (“Awake!”). Nor was Hitler the only Nazi who expressed reverence for the German musical tradition. Hans Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland, said that his favorite composers were Bach, Brahms, and Reger. The Berlin Staatskapelle played Siegfried’s Funeral Music at the funeral of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, whose father had played in Hans von Bülow’s orchestra and sung major tenor roles at Bayreuth. And Josef Mengele whistled favorite airs as he selected victims for the gas chambers in Auschwitz. There are many such anecdotes about music in the Third Reich, and they reinforce Thomas Mann’s controversial but not easily refuted contention that during Hitler’s reign as dictator of Germany great art was allied with great evil. “Thank God,” Richard Strauss said after Hitler came to power, “finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”
In the nineteenth century, music, especially German music, was considered a sacred realm sufficient in itself, floating far above the ordinary world. In Nietzsche’s caustic phrase, it became a “telephone from the beyond.” Arthur Schopenhauer claimed in all earnestness that art and life had nothing to do with each other: “Beside the history of the world the history of philosophy, science, and art is guiltless and unstained by blood.” Hans Pfitzner quoted those words as the epigraph to his 1917 opera Palestrina, which celebrated a composer’s ability to rise above the politics of his time. Later, the composer used that same page of his score to write a dedication to Mussolini. That action made nonsense of the claim that music can achieve total autonomy from the society around it. Precisely because of its inarticulate nature, it is all too easily imprinted with ideologies and deployed to political ends.
In the wake of Hitler, classical music suffered not only incalculable physical losses—composers murdered in concentration camps, future talents killed on the beaches of Normandy and on the eastern front, opera houses and concert halls destroyed, émigrés forgotten in foreign lands—but a deeper loss of moral authority. During the war the Allies did their best to rescue the masterpieces of German tradition from Nazi propaganda, reappropriating them as emblems of the struggle against tyranny. The first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth were matched to the Morse code signal for V, as in “Victory.” As the years went by, however, classical music acquired a sinister aura in popular culture. Hollywood, which once had made musicians the fragile heroes of prestige pictures, began to give them a sadistic mien. By the 1970s the juxtaposition of “great music” and barbarism had become a cinematic cliché: in A Clockwork Orange, a young thug fantasizes ultraviolently to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth, and in Apocalypse Now American soldiers assault a Vietnamese village with the aid of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Now, when any self-respecting Hollywood archcriminal sets out to enslave mankind, he listens to a little classical music to get in the mood.
The ultimate correlation of music and horror is found in Paul Celan’s 1944–45 poem “Death Fugue,” in which a blue-eyed German instructs death-camp inmates in the art of digging their own graves. As he speaks, he mutates into a conductor urging his violin section to “bow more darkly,” for “death is a Meister from Germany.”
The aftermath of Hitler’s corrosive love of music is unavoidable. Much of subsequent twentieth-century musical history is a struggle to come to terms with it. Although there is no point in trying to restore Schopenhauer’s separation of art and state, it is equally false to claim the opposite, that art can somehow be swallowed up in history or irreparably damaged by it. Music may not be inviolable, but it is infinitely variable, acquiring a new identity in the mind of every new listener. It is always in the world, neither guilty nor innocent, subject to the ever-changing human landscape in which it moves.
“There is too much music in Germany,” Romain Rolland wrote, back in the heyday of Mahler and Strauss. Something was lurking, the French writer suspected, in these humongous Teutonic symphonies and music dramas—a cult of power, a “hypnotism of force.” Germans themselves recognized the demonic strain in their culture. During the First World War, the not yet liberal-Democratic Thomas Mann wrote a manifesto titled Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, in which he praised all the backward German tendencies that he would later come to lament in the pages of Doctor Faustus. In the earlier work, Mann states that art “has a basically undependable, treacherous tendency; its joy in scandalous antireason, its tendency to beauty-creating ‘barbarism,’ cannot be rooted out …”
The melding of German music with reactionary politics goes back to Wagner. The composer’s 1850 pamphlet Das Judentum in der Musik, or Jewry in Music, decried the “Jewification” of German music and de manded that the Jews undergo Untergang and Selbstvernichtung—destruction and self-annihilation.
“Vernichtung” is the word that the Nazis used to describe the mass murder of the European Jews, as Wagner’s most astringent latter-day critics, such as Paul Lawrence Rose and Joachim Köhler, have emphasized. Jens Malte Fischer and other scholars have countered by pointing out that Wagner, in line with Hegel and other German thinkers, conceived “annihilation” not as a physical process but as a spiritual one, akin to Buddhist self-abnegation. Yet, even amid the chorus of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, Wagner’s rantings stood out for their malicious intensity. The Jews, he once said, were “the born enemy of pure humanity and all that is noble in man.” They were also, he said, the “plastic demon of the ruin of mankind”—a phrase that Joseph Goebbels often employed in his speeches, and that appeared in the foul anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew.
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