Gesammelte Werke

expand – that the
avantgarde
represented the true societal interest against blindness, spite, and conventionalism of the actual audience. The discord which became the symbol of so-called
Kulturbolschewismus
and which is the conspicuous identification mark of the musical
avantgarde,
the supposed spirit of negativism and destruction, kept faith to Beethoven's humanism by expressing all the sufferings, the anguish, the fear of the crisis under which we live, long before this crisis actually started, instead of covering it up by idle comfort. It thus has maintained the link between music and philosophical truth. This does not only refer to the expressive sincerity of artists, such as Schoenberg, but also to their purely musical qualities, their severe and undisguised construction shunning all ornamentation, embellishment, everything which is not strictly necessary. We know today how deeply the often denounced subjectivism of the so-called atonal
avantgarde
was bound up from the beginning with functionalism.
    Yet it is the very aloofness and non-conformity of this music which did not only keep it away from the market, but also created a kind of resentment which belongs to the most significant phenomena of the German musical climate for Fascism. Only those who know to what extent artistic and especially musical questions are involved with political issues throughout German cultural life can fully understand the emotional role played by the hatred against the music of the
avantgarde
within all reactionary and repressive groups of German society. Fascist cynicism never confessed itself openly as such. It was always cloaked by a net of highly conventional social, moral, and esthetic values which nobody took quite seriously. The more they practised anarchy, lawlessness, and cruelty in reality, the more they professed their belief in traditional orderliness in every respect. The musical
avantgarde,
on the other hand, disavowed by all of its works, by the subject matters chosen no less than by the musical structures themselves, these conventionalized ideas of beauty, harmony, nobleness, heroism, discipline and what not. Just because the Nazis and their fellow travellers never could fully believe in those clicés, or rather in the realization of the true meaning of such values within their own reality they felt an almost maniacal hatred against anything that could remind them of the spuriousness of their own faith. The discords of the musical
ars nova
were not simply disliked, nor does the explanation suffice that the highly complex compositions of the
avantgarde
composers were not properly understood. One may say that in a sense they were understood only too well and therefore provoked a fury among the listeners which is utterly disproportionate to the role played by this music in public life and which proves rather the bad conscience of the infuriated than any intrinsic defect of the objects of their resentment.
    This resentment as well as the musical decultivation of the German middle classes, and certain ill-defined collectivistic tendencies of the pre-fascist era found their quasi-positive expression in the so-called musical folk and youth movement. During the
Third Reich
this movement came into a certain antagonism with the party and seems to have been abolished or absorbed by the
Hitler Youth.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this movement, represented by people, such as the notorious Fritz Joede, had a strong affinity to the spirit of Fascism. I do not want to stress such obvious aspects as the connection between this musical collectivism and the fascist folk ideology, a connection which is based upon the fact that the idea of collectivity is made a fetish, glorified as such, without any reference to any concrete social content. But there are less obvious features to which I should like to draw your attention. There is a strong repressive trend throughout this musical collectivism, a hatred against the individual, the supposedly refined and sophisticated which is an expression of envy of those whose individuality could not truly develop, rather than the desire for a true solidarity of men which would presuppose those very individual qualities which are taboo to the agitators of musical collectivism. There is, moreover, the wish for barbarian simplicity at any price, the contempt for the
métier,
the unwillingness to learn anything – a kind of glorification of the supposedly plain, average man which may be