Nicholas Montenz
Ed. Archinto Milan 2013
pp. 329
In this essay, the author analyzes the complexity of the relationship between music and politics in Nazi Germany in the years between 1933 and 1945. The fight against the Jew, in fact, did not manifest itself only with brute force, but he also took on “The more subtle, and no less effective, forms of intellectual disqualification and boycotting of the activities of the Jews themselves, especially cultural ones. Among these, music played a central role, whose active practice carried out in Germany an essential task in the formation of the individual, so much so that it was configured as a largely institutionalized phenomenon, and the object of careful organization. "
On November 15, 1933, from a proposal by Goebbels, Minister for Popular Education and Propaganda, the RKK (Reichskulturkammer) came into operation, with which the National Socialist government gained absolute control over the artists and the intellectual life of the Reich. The purges that upset German musical life, however, began well before the results of the March 1933 elections were known. Arnold Schönberg, the father of dodecaphony, already an emblem of decadence and evil in music, after the National Socialists ban the person and the works, he left Germany in the spring of 1933. The most sensational purge, however, in consideration of the international fame of the victim, was that of the conductor Bruno Walter, object, for many years, of the personal hatred of Hitler "Who saw him as a totally unworthy Jewish musician to direct real German music (especially Wagner's works)."
A controversial position was that of Richard Strauss who was officially accommodating to the regime; from the beginning "He looked with uneasiness at the vortex of purges which, by decimating the German staff, also deprived his works of the best interpreters." Although he did not tolerate that the regime dared to put his nose in his artistic choices, he, however, was silent, guilty. "Too important, at least in the early years, he felt the need to reinforce a fame that age was dying out." Thus, his position appeared publicly in complete condescension to the regime.
Wilhelm Furtwängler, a Jew, the most celebrated and paid German conductor of the time, however, aware both of the fact that the new government needed his collaboration, and of the veneration that Hitler had towards him, "He looked suspiciously at the regime's pretensions of alignment, and refused decisively to Aryanize the Berlin Philharmonic staff," even if his positions towards anti-Semitism were dictated above all by artistic evaluations.
However, the law of April 7, not infrequently was disregarded, even by some ministers, when it came to defending their non-Aryan darlings. There were, therefore, exceptions through which Germany of 1933-34 "He tried to show his best profile to foreign observers despite everything." But the regime's prevailing approach was to eliminate the Jewish element from German music "It didn't simply mean cleaning up all possible non-Aryans operating in Germany," but it also involved the aryanisation of the vocal repertoire of German theaters. The librettos of works by Mozart, Handel, Verdi, Rossini were thus revised.
The music that the Führer became infatuated with was that of Richard Wagner. And it was with Winifred, the wife of Wagner's son, that the connivance between Nazism and the Wagner family began, as Hitler began attending the villa that Wagner had had built in Bayreuth, already in 1923. "Bayreuth and the legendary aura from which it was surrounded played a fundamental role in the construction of the Hitlerian myth and in the metamorphosis of the failed superman, the model of every German."
Membership in the National Socialist Party favored the career of many musicians, and among them there was the musical miracle of the Third Reich, Herbert von Karajan, although no official declaration of his in favor of the regime, of pure Germanic music, of state anti-Semitism. Poorly endured by the Führer who, through Goebbels, sent him the message of never daring to direct from memory, he was a rival to Furtwängler, of whom, at thirty, he took his place on the podium.
Registration for the party “On the part of artists wishing to make a decisive change in their professional existence, it was far from infrequent during the twelve years of the millennial Rech; however, there was no lack of examples of musicians literally subjugated by Hitler's personality, to the point of considering active participation in the life of the party as an irrepressible necessity. " No one, however, could be considered safe from makeshift showers, which also affected Strauss and Furtwängler. And so, "The lists of people to be eliminated were joined by those of music to be prohibited."
Music was also present in concentration camps, with orchestras and musical groups, spontaneous or forced, formed by internees. The music, in the concentration camps, also accompanied the torture sessions or served to cover the shots of the shootings. And if on the one hand music has constituted, at times, a simple opportunity for the members of an orchestra to avoid, or at least delay as much as possible the sending to the gas chambers, on the other "It was the only possible antidote to the cancellation of consciousness."
Gianlorenzo Capano
