The German Genius

time to replace dismissed Jewish soloists with “Aryan” substitutes and so he held on until they were ready before insisting on change. In the case of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Goebbels was forced to go especially slowly because the orchestra was private, its musicians unaffected by the April 1933 Civil Service Law that removed all Jews from public (civil) service and dismissed artists from their museum and art school posts. Instead, Goebbels arranged for the orchestra to be starved of funds until it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Then he rode to the rescue, guaranteeing funds but at the price—eventually—of the dismissal of all Jews and enemies of the regime. In the end, the RMK expelled more musicians than did any other branch of the RKK as these figures by Erik Levi show:
     
     
    N UMBER OF E XPULSIONS C ARRIED O UT BY RKK
     
    Film: 750 Press: 420
     
    Theater: 535 Music: 2,310
     
    Writing: 1,303 Art: 1,657
     
     
    Again, to begin with (fateful words), the Kulturbund provided the Nazis with propaganda in that it enabled them to insist there was plenty of work for Jewish musicians in Germany, and statistics appeared to bear this out: between 1934 and 1938 the Kulturbund gave 57 opera performances and 358 concerts, playing before 180,000 people in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, and Munich. It was prohibited from performing Fidelio but otherwise gave a “standard” repertoire. The situation deteriorated first in the provinces and came to a head on Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, after which the opera section was closed down, though concerts were given until September 1941. 30
    One interesting difference between art and music was that although paintings could not be “Aryanized,” there were attempts to make this happen with music. The regime invited contemporary composers to produce replacements for Mendelssohn’s ever-popular music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (forty-four scores were produced, though none really caught on). Both Schubert and Schumann had set to music poems by Heine, who was Jewish, and there was widespread debate about the propriety of performing such “hybrid” creations. In the case of Mozart’s Così fan tutte , Le Nozze di Figaro , and Don Giovanni , in which the librettos had been written by the baptized Jew Lorenzo Da Ponte and translated into German by the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi, the NSKG commissioned Siegfried Anheisser to provide a new “Aryan” retranslation. By 1938 his translations had been adopted in 76 of Germany’s 85 opera houses. 31 There were several other examples of this procedure.
    It wasn’t only Jews who were targets. The contemporary music festival at Baden-Baden was stopped, and the experimental Kroll Opera in Berlin abolished in 1931, even before the Nazis came to power, but partly thanks to their agitation. * 32 Early in 1933 Nazi protests against contemporary music were stepped up, together with a ban on the broadcasting of jazz, viewed as a degenerate example of “Negro culture.” † Censorship was temporarily relaxed in 1935–36, ahead of the Berlin Olympics, when a larger than usual number of foreigners—especially Americans—were in Germany, but was resumed soon afterward. An Entarte Musik exhibition was held in Düsseldorf in May 1938, the brainchild of Adolf Ziegler, a major feature of which was photographs of composers—Schoenberg, Hindemith, Webern—who were considered to have a destructive influence on German music. There were six booths where, at the touch of a button, visitors could hear examples of Hindemith, Weill, Ernst Krenek, and others. 33
    The dissonant music of Richard Strauss escaped censure but not that of Schoenberg’s disciples Webern and Berg. Lulu was performed in Berlin in November 1934 and provoked such a scandal that no other work by Berg was ever performed in the Third Reich. The attitudes of the Nazis toward Paul Hindemith had been hostile even before 1933, not just because of his modernist music but because of his links to Bertolt Brecht. But, as professor of composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik since 1927, he occupied a high profile position in which he exerted an influence over a whole generation of composers, and not just German ones. As an “Aryan” and Germany’s next most prominent composer after Strauss, he had influence, the more so when Strauss nominated him to be part of the inner council of the RMK in November 1933. In February 1934, a concert to unveil the