Gesammelte Werke

transformed into a weapon against any minority which does not conform to his standards. There is, furthermore, the display of an aggressive spirit of community as an end in itself, played up artificially so as not to allow any questioning of its real meaning. This last element is perhaps the most important one. It bears witness to the manipulated, calculated nature of this supposed folk music. The more it pretends to be the expression of »we the people«, the more certain we may be that it is actually dictated by very particularistic clique interests, intolerant, aggressive and greedy for power. The
Weimar Republic
was a particularly fertile breeding ground for such pseudo-democratic trends which turned very easily into their opposite. Whoever has gone through the German experience becomes suspicious when he meets with any kind of organized folk art which is conscious of its own folksy character.
    I may briefly summarize. We have mentioned, as indicative of a fascist musical climate in Germany before Hitler, the following phenomena which of course gain their true meaning only in a much broader societal context.
    (1) The direct and indirect influence of Wagner
    (2) The subsequent musical decultivation of the German middle classes
    (3) The severing of the link between music and humanistic tradition as exemplified by Richard Strauss
    (4) The spitefulness and hatred directed against the serious attempts of the musical
avantgarde
    (5) The artificial creation of a so-called folk art by order.
    As to the musical climate during the
Third Reich
itself, I shall confine myself to some very few remarks. We know more about the measures taken by the Nazis than about their actual effect upon the population as a whole. My own experience with music after 1933 in Germany is much too limited as to allow me to give a comprehensive picture. Dr. Rubsamen has pointed out some of the later developments. The following observations, however, may be made:
    (1) Musical life in Nazi Germany became above all largely conventionalized. It would be erroneous to assume that there ever sprung into life a specific Nazi musical culture. Any attempts to create it by order were limited to the most fanatic groups of the Nazi movement and never got hold of the bulk of the population, just as official Nazi poetry never became really popular. What actually happened was rather an exaltation of everything established, and particularly, of everything internationally recognized. So-called big shots, supposedly acceptable to everyone, such as Furtwängler, Gieseking, or Backhaus were made the most of. Moreover, a number of older second-rate composers, such as Paul Graener who were full of resentment because they were never taken too seriously by competent musicians, felt that their hour had struck and joined the Nazi movement, in order to get a break. None of their works, however, met with any considerable success.
    (2) 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 who had exercised a certain appeal to larger audiences, such as Hindemith or Kurt Weill. The latter's non-Aryan descent was no obstacle to one of the most successful Nazi opera composers, Mr. Wagner-Régeny, who copied Weill's style with all his mannerisms almost entirely.
    (3) 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 critical standards, 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 fellow travellers and all those who tried to coordinate themselves quickly to the catch words of the Nazi ideology. Thus the compliant musicians, and above all the composers, were left somewhat confused and had to tread the mark. Some of them tried to get away with a mixture of popular folk art and techniques derived from neo-classicism. Of course, some talents of the first order, such as Winfried Zillig and Ludwig Zenk, remained in Germany and an opera of Zillig's was actually performed. But these authors were much too deeply involved with modernistic movements to