Gesammelte Werke

climate for Fascism or rather were indicative of the same social forces which ultimately made for political Fascism too. I dwelt on these aspects because we have reason to believe that it is they which are likely to persist, though in many ways modified, after Hitler's defeat. As far as the actual musical situation under Hitler is concerned, I confine myself to some brief remarks.
    It would be erroneous to assume that there ever sprung into life a specific musical Nazi culture. What was profoundly changed by the system was the function of music which now openly became a means to an end, a propagandistic device or an ideological export article among many others. However, any attempts to create a music, intrinsically National Socialist by order, were limited to the most fanatic groups of the Nazi movement and never got hold of any responsible artist, nor of the bulk of the population, just as official Nazi poetry never became really popular.
    As to the production of the younger generation of more or less fervent believers in the Nazi ideology a number of new names appeared but what they actually achieved largely amounted to a feeble and diluted imitation of some of the better known composers of the Weimar era, particularly of those collectivist composers who had exercised a certain appeal to larger audiences, such as Hindemith or Kurt Weill. The latter's Jewish decent was no obstacle to one of the more successful Nazi opera composers, Mr. Wagner-Régeny, who copied Weill's style with all its mannerisms almost entirely.
    The most important characteristic of musical life under Hitler seems to me a complete stagnation, a »freezing« of all musical styles of composing and performing and of all standards of criticism, comparable to the freezing of wages under Hitler. Throughout cultural life the Nazis developed a kind of double-edged policy. On the one hand they raged against modernism and
Kulturbolschewismus,
on the other hand they disavowed what they themselves called fellow travellers,
Mitläufer,
that is to say those artists who tried to coordinate themselves quickly to the catchwords of the Nazi ideology without enjoying the privilege of being Party old-timers. Thus the compliant musicians and, above all, the composers, were left some-what confused. Musical stagnation as well as that of art as a whole did not remain unnoticed by the more intelligent Nazis and even Herr Rosenberg, who generally had to take an attitude of official optimism once suggested the idea that there was no time for great artistic production today and that the energies formerly invested in the arts were now properly absorbed by technical and military ventures. This amounts to a forthright admission of artistic bankruptcy. Subsequently, the restrictions put upon composing were somewhat lifted in order to raise the artistic standards. As soon, however, as the Party allowed any bolder work to make its public appearance, the official Nazi critics spoke threateningly of
Kulturbolschewismus.
Thus an atmosphere of total insecurity was brought about, comparable to the strange amalgamation of strictly enforced laws and arbitrary illegality so characteristic of the Third Reich. It exercized a paralyzing effect. The best a German artist could hope for was escape into what has been properly called
innere Emigration,
internal emigration. Whereas German artistic tradition had evaporated and artistic pioneering had been eliminated at the surface, the Nazis failed completely in building up even a
façade
of a musical culture of their own. The same people who always had blamed intellectual cliques for modernism in the arts, remained themselves a clique whose folk ideas proved to be even more distant from the life of the people than the most esoteric products of expressionism and surrealism. Paradoxical as it sounds, the Germans were more willing to fight Hitler's battles than to listen to the plays and operas of his lackeys. When the war catastrophe put an end to the remnants of public German musical life, it merely executed a judgment that was silently spoken since the Hitler gang had established its dictatorship over culture.
    What then are we going to expect as an aftermath of the trends which I tried to point out to you? I do not intend to dwell on the question whether economic conditions in Europe as a whole and particularly in Central Europe will allow any artistic culture or whether the apathy of the population after the war will result in their becoming