Gesammelte Werke

make any headway. They, as well as an older master such as Anton Webern, went artistically underground. It remains to be seen whether they succeeded in salvaging any elements of genuine modern composing. I should like to mention as a curiosity that an elderly Nazi composer, a particularly bad one, Paul Klenau, even tried to adapt the twelve-tone-technique to his trash. The 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 and that the energies formerly invested in art were now properly absorbed by technical and military ventures. Consequently, 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.
The atmosphere of insecurity thus created purposely must have exercised a paralysing effect. The best a German composer could hope for was escape into what has properly been called
innere Emigration,
internal emigration.
    Whereas the tradition of old musical culture had evaporated and advanced trends 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 had always blamed intellectual cliques for modernism in music remained musically a clique whose folk ideas proved to be even more distant from the life of the people than advanced modern music. Gradually there developed a musical vacuum. Paradoxical as it sounds, the Germans were more willing to fight Hitler's battles than to listen to the operas and symphonies 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.
     
    Ca. 1945
     
     

Toward a Reappraisal of Heine
     
    The position of Heine's lyrical poetry in the history of the German mind has fluctuated between extremes. During the nineteenth century Heine's poetry stood at the height of popularity. There was hardly any German lyrist whose work was as widely read as his. It has been stated with good reason that the
Buch der Lieder
was the last manifestation of the German lyrical spirit which proved to be of European significance and interest – comparable, in this respect, only to Baudelaire's considerably later
Fleurs du Mal
which by themselves, were much more esoteric. The range of Heine's influence was equally strong among artists and intellectuals, on one hand, and middle-class consumers on the other. Equally important is his impact upon music. The history of the German
Kunstlied
is unthinkable without Heine. Those compositions for Heine's verses which Schubert wrote shortly before he died, rank among the boldest and most advanced musical ventures of the period, anticipating with the violence of an explosion the extreme and unchecked expressiveness of later romanticism. Neither the polished
intérieur
songs of Mendelssohn nor the self-forgotten melancholy of those of Schumann would have been possible, were it not for Heine's texts. Even Richard Wagner, the nationalist and rabid anti-Semite, borrowed the scenario of his
Flying Dutchman
from the Jewish refugee in Paris, and Wagner's friend and foe Nietzsche not only expressed his adoration for Heine but shows the latter's influence in the nervous flexibility of his style and the climate of irony as a medium of subjective expression which permeates his whole work. In addition to his success with the elite, however, Heine maintained a tremendous hold over the bulk of the educated and semi-educated. His verses were the last ones which belonged to the sphere of serious artistic production while enjoying mass consumption and stimulating widespread imitation by laymen. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there was no German business man with cultural ambitions who would not, when he felt compelled to write a birthday poem for his wife or his mother, imitate some established model of Heine's. The results were atrocious and led straight away to advertizing poetry. But they give evidence of an impact going beyond passive reception. Heine affected the last remnants of expressive urges surviving in the