By Bashkim Trenova
Part Eleven
NAZIBOLSHEVISM – LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
FOREWORD
Memorie.al – Historians, political philosophers, intellectuals from different schools or positions have dedicated thousands and thousands of pages, entire volumes, studies, and articles to the comparison between Nazism and Communism. Generally, in their publications and studies, they focus on the police control of society by these dictatorships, the role of the dictatorial state hierarchy, the head of state as suppressor of free thought, the omnipresence of official propaganda in society, the mass massacres and the network of concentration camps, the activity of the police, the NKVD in the USSR (later the KGB) and the Gestapo in the Third Reich. In his book “Le Passé d’une illusion” (The Past of an Illusion), François Furet notes that Nazism and Communism share the same opposition to liberal democracy and what they call “capitalist bourgeoisie”. Both ideologies claim to be socialist and use the image of socialism. Communist countries called themselves “socialist”. “Nazism” is an abbreviation of National Socialism.
Continued from the previous issue
Chapter II – MUSIC
Music has often served as a great art for dictatorial regimes. For the Nazis, it would become a powerful weapon for simultaneously demonstrating the eternal genius of the German people and Aryan superiority. Its power was used by the Nazis as a perfect propaganda weapon, as a striking force. It is significant that even during the final Allied bombings, when everything had practically ended, concerts continued in Nazi Germany and the Nazi leaders, all of them, continued to attend these concerts.
Even before coming to power, the Nazis saw literature, visual arts, theater as important tools for indoctrinating the masses, for creating a mass nationalist movement. For the same purpose, they valued music as the art most capable of attracting and manipulating crowds, even more powerfully and completely. Goebbels himself, the German Minister of Propaganda, would state: “Music touches the heart and emotions more than the intellect. And where else could the heart of a nation beat more powerfully than among the masses, in whose bosom this heart has found its true hearth?”
As a result of the exclusionary measures and the exercise of absolute party and state control in all spheres related to musical activity, the situation in this sector would change radically compared to the years preceding 1933, which marks the Nazis’ rise to power. Evidence of this grim reality is also the endless number of compositions of the time, marches, and light music, played during important official party or state events, but also outside them, dedicated to Hitler, Germany, and the glorious future of the Reich! “In 1938, music became a powerful tool of Third Reich propaganda and Germany was declared the ‘Land of Music’. One kind of music, of course. German music must dominate the musical world, just as the Third Reich would dominate Europe.”
Nazism gave music a very great power. It was not seen by them merely as an art form among others, but as the “most German” of all arts. For this, they also exploited the idea that Germany, the German nation, had formed their identity from music, from the creativity of many Germanic Baroque, Classical, and Romantic composers who strongly influenced European and international musical life. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, and Wagner, as well as many orchestra conductors and musicians, were a great source of pride at the beginning of the 20th century. On the social plane, music was valued and used by the Hitlerites as a chosen tool to return to “German values”, nationalism, and to propagandize the “People’s Community”.
According to them, as the Nazi doctor of musicology, Hans Schnoor, would write in his book ‘Oratorien und weltliche Chorwerke’ (‘Oratorios and Secular Choral Works’), published in 1932 in 120,000 copies, “The new spiritual Germany contains… the people and the Führer, the homeland, blood and soil (‘Blut und Boden’), race, myth, the history of heroes…”! Upon these iron milestones, every composer, performer, orchestra and orchestral player, every musical spectacle, all musical genres in the Third Reich would extend their activity.
The National Socialists, as in the case of Hans Schnoor, sought a “pure” German music. They pretended to be adherents of a music stripped of intellectualism and cosmopolitanism, in direct relationship with the people, of a music sung to children from the cradle, that has its source in the “roots” of the people, in “folk music”, in the “music of the people”, in “folk songs”. It is this music that, according to Hitler, would advance the German people, what he called the German “folk spirit”.
In Hitlerian Germany, music also occupied an important place in party activities. Hitler personally was involved in appointing orchestra conductors and distributing honours related to music, approving and financing several institutions and individuals, using certain compositions such as the military march ‘Badenweiler Marsch’ or the ‘Nibelungenmarsch’ which was played only on official occasions of the Nazi Party. He determined the authorised time for the Deutschlandlied (national anthem) and for the Horst-Wessel-Lied (the anthem of the German Nazi Party).
For the Nazis, music in general must be pulsating, aligned in squares, tyrannical, rhythmic, just as the Nazi citizen must be. The song and its lyrics must be energetic, with a sharp rhythm and articulated strongly and clearly. The music, the compositions of these years, are hymns dedicated to the head of the National Socialist Party, the “martyrs”, now turned into heroes, i.e., Hitler’s comrades who lost their lives during the failed Munich putsch. The songs are dedicated to the glory of the homeland, the flag, and the call to arms. They do not forget the international enemy either.
The Third Reich used music as an emotional instrument for the indoctrination of the population as a whole and of the fanatical and violent Hitlerian youth groups, of the youth as the main reservoir of cannon fodder recruits. This role is played by choral songs, with a repetitive rhythm and a group dynamic, as well as military parade marches (Marschlieder). Through them, the aim is to teach young people to march in step, under the same rhythm, to militarize their worldview, an iron discipline and the spirit of unconditional obedience. “Forward! Forward! Youth does not ask about danger. Führer, we belong to you. All comrades belong to you. And the flag leads us to eternity! Yes, the flag is stronger than death.” These verses are taken from the text of the Hitler Youth Anthem.
Also part of this “family” is the song Volk ans Rifle (People to Arms) written in 1931 by Arno Pardun, dedicated to Joseph Goebbels. During the war, this song was used as a military march. Its lyrics contain verses kneaded with Nazi ideology and its spirit, such as, for example, the demand for living space in the East; “Do you see the dawn in the East?” Raw anti-Semitism also takes place in these verses: “Germany awoke, Judah dies.” Likewise, militarist calls: “People to arms, People to arms”! Here is a full stanza: “Do you see the dawn in the East? / A sign of freedom, of the sun! / We stand united, alive or dead / whatever may come! / Why doubt now, stop speaking / German blood always flows in our veins. / People to arms! People to arms”!
After the anthem of the Nazi Party, one of the most renowned songs of the German National Socialists is that titled ‘Es zittern die morschen Knochen’ (‘The Rotten Bones Tremble’). This song was written in 1932 by the Nazi poet and composer Hans Baumann. Here are some verses from the song’s text: “We will keep on marching / even if everything collapses / Because Germany awaits us today / And tomorrow the whole world will await us.” The same role is played by those songs that can be grouped under the common theme of ‘Blut und Boden’ (Blood and Soil), which exalts the peasant and Mother Earth, or Mother Nature, as the source of life and its continuity, in short: Land and Homeland. Examples include the songs Wir kämpfen für Ehre (We Fight for Honour), Die Regimentskinder (The Regiment’s Children), the words of which are in perfect harmony with Nazi ideology and appetites.
In accordance with this ideology and these appetites, the Nazis did not hesitate to go to extremes even in the field of music, to appropriate, for example, the Internationale renaming it the Hitlernationale and changing its text from “Arise, you wretched” to “Arise, Hitler’s people, close ranks”. The Nazis created numerous musical organizations, organized song and music festivals, musical demonstrations, etc., to convey their “German” music to every household, every school, every barracks, their gigantic demonstrations and festivals. They created music schools for children and young people, the so-called Jugendmusikschulen.
Some organizations such as the Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst), whose task was to send children for six months to the countryside for voluntary agricultural work (Kinderlandverschickung), gathered them in camps where music played its “educational” and propaganda role. The head of the Hitler Youth, Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, responsible for the physical, ideological, and moral education of youth, appointed by Hitler to this post, created a music education program for this youth. Even soldiers at the front had to participate in cultural activities, in evenings with songs. During the years 1933-1945, especially during the war years, a large number of song collections were published for soldiers. One can mention Das Lied der Front (Songs of the Front) by Alfred Ingemar Berndt, a journalist, writer, and close associate of Joseph Goebbels.
Das Lied der Front is a collection of military marches and war songs to be taught in German schools and popular choirs. The music recording companies, initially reserved towards Nazi music, quickly realized they had to change their tune. Many of them placed themselves at the service of Nazism with all their capacities. Electrola, for example, produced in 1933 seven recordings dedicated to marches and songs with a nationalist Nazi spirit. Deutsche Grammophon released its 1939-1940 catalogues with one hundred and eighty Nazi marches, eight different versions of the Horst Wessel Lied, and six of Hitler’s favourite work, the Badenweiler March.
The Hitlerites characterized German musical life as a Musikkulturkampf (Cultural Battle for Music) against hostile and destructive influences from a second-rate culture, which, in essence, from a racial point of view, is foreign. In his book Mein Kampf, on page 273 (Franz Eher Verlag edition, Munich, 1925), the leader of German Nazism, Adolf Hitler, writes about the artistic degeneration and spiritual degeneration of Germany, about its political and cultural ruin like never before. He does not spare, on this occasion, the bearers of this reality, those he stigmatizes as “degenerate”, as “insane”, with whom, as the author of Mein Kampf writes, the Germans have become familiar. As a “recipe” to overcome this situation, the Hitlerites practiced the unification of art with the party and the state, its complete assimilation with Nazism, its total control.
In the field of music, it is the RMK or the Reich Music Chamber, led by Joseph Goebbels that is tasked with caring for the “spiritual health” of the people, controlling every musical activity everywhere and regardless of size or character. This Chamber constitutes one of the seven chambers of the Reichskulturkammer (RKK) or the Reich Chamber of Culture, established on 22 September 1933. In 1937, Goebbels, to more directly control musical activity in the country, transferred the services of the Music Chamber to the Ministry of Propaganda, alongside which the Reich Music Censorship Council or Reichsmusikprüfstelle was established. The duty of this Council is to control all publications, programs, broadcasts, and musical recordings.
This Council also draws up and distributes the list of prohibited works. According to Article 10 of the Reichsmusikkammer, a musician cannot be a member of it, or if he is, he can be expelled if he “lacks the professional qualities or the appropriate moral integrity” according to the Nazi yardstick. The political commitment of any musician, not talent, became the basic criterion in his evaluation. This also led to the emergence of mediocre artists, but slaves of the system, of politics, of those who were regularly used as servants of Reich propaganda. On the other hand, again according to Article 10 of the Reichsmusikkammer, the exercise of the profession was forbidden to any musician who was seen as unsuitable for Hitlerian Germany, especially Jewish musicians or those who had distinguished themselves during the years of the Weimar Republic.
The Music Chamber (RMK) based its membership selection on racist criteria. Every kind of engagement in the musical field, every kind of employment or career prospect, was reserved for “Aryans”. Non-conformist composers and their compositions were meanwhile branded as “destroyers of the heroic spirit” and of “the culture of a people”, as “anti-militarist”, “demoralizing”, as “corrupters of youth’s morals”. Another label attached to them was that of spreading “degeneration”. In Düsseldorf, in 1938, the exhibition Entartete Music (Degenerate Music) was inaugurated, modelled on the exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) opened a year earlier in Munich. For the Nazis, “degenerate” music was a danger that had to be fought decisively as an enemy of the German people and its revival.
One must go back to the 19th century and to the field of medicine to understand the fear that the adjective “degenerate” carried in the thinking of the time and why the Nazis reactivated it, gave it life, made it a kind of compass of their politics, a dominant with destructive force. In the second half of the 19th century, the term “degeneration” was used by doctors to distinguish those who differed from the human type considered normal, because their nerves were destroyed, because they had inherited abnormal traits, because they showed moral weakness or were abnormal in their sexual life.
It is understood that for the danger they posed to society, these unbalanced, degenerate individuals could not be left free. Thus, according to Nazi logic, modern artists, all those who did not agree with the official line, reproduced in their work merely their nervous deformation, anomalies, monstrosity, ugliness. They were stripped of any possibility or facility for realistic observation and, consequently, irregular forms dominated their creativity. In 1937, more precisely on 18 July of that year, during the official inauguration of the House of German Art, Hitler declared: “Works of art that cannot be understood and need to be accompanied by a bunch of explanations to thus prove their right to exist, and that touch the sensitive nerves of nonsense and impertinence of this kind, will no longer be able to touch the German nation. Let no one have any illusion! National Socialism has the duty to save the German Reich and our people from all these influences that threaten its existence and its character. The opening of this exhibition marks the end of artistic madness and, with it, the artistic pollution of our people.” Opponents of the regime, or even those who simply did not want to be its blind tools, were accused by the Nazis also as spreaders of “Bolshevik culture” in the field of music. The so-called “Bolshevik culture” was directly linked by the Nazis to Jewish culture, or, according to the term used by them, to Yiddish culture. It, always according to the Nazis, was its expression, while the Bolsheviks were merely tools of “Jewry”.
In Hitlerian Germany, by law, such as the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, even “half-Jews” or women married to Jews were forbidden to compose or exercise artistic responsibility. The Nazis also struck the field of music publishing. Hundreds of publishers and employees of music publishing houses were persecuted, prosecuted, or imprisoned. According to Hans Joachim Moser, one of the authorities in the music sector in the Reich Ministry for Popular Education and Propaganda, the musical landscape of Nazi Germany is defined with the words: “As in all other fields, Jewry has penetrated the musical sphere of the United States and Europe; publishers, agents, and the press have managed to place their fellow race members in almost all key positions, thus trying to impose their tastes on the public…! But if since 1933 they have been excluded from our cultural sphere, this has come as a result of an urgent and legitimate need to protect the Aryan people from the intellectual and economic tyranny imposed on us by Jewry.” The Hitlerites exercised the same exclusionary, racist policy also in the sphere of operatic music, in the repertoire of the Opera Theatre. In June 1935, the President of the Reich Chamber of Culture, Richard Strauss, issued a register that included three categories of operas that could be performed on German stages. Sometime later, he also issued a list containing 108 compositions that “should never be performed”. / Memorie.al
To be continued in the next issue
