Tag: Paul Hindemith

Von Karajan and other musical Nazis

Not long ago, with reference to Jonathan Petropoulos’s recent book Artists under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany, we looked at the lives of a few painters, writers, filmmakers, and composers who, faced with the prospect of working under the Nazi regime, chose either to flee the country or to stay and pursue various degrees of collaboration – some of them accepting Nazi oversight with shame and reluctance, others becoming ardent followers of the Führer.

Fritz Trümpi

Our coverage of these Nazi-era artists, of course, wasn’t comprehensive. Another new book, The Political Orchestra by Austrian scholar Fritz Trümpi, provides a highly illuminating pendant to Petropoulos’s. Trümpi’s subject, as stated in his subtitle, is “The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics During the Third Reich.” As Terry Teachout put it in a review of Trümpi’s book for the June issue of Commentary, “The story of European classical music under the Third Reich is one of the most squalid chapters in the annals of Western culture, a chronicle of collective complaisance that all but beggars belief.” Teachout makes a crucial point:

Terry Teachout

Without exception, all of the well-known musicians who left Germany and Austria in protest when Hitler came to power in 1933 were either Jewish or, like the violinist Adolf Busch, Rudolf Serkin’s father-in-law, had close family ties to Jews. Moreover, most of the small number of non-Jewish musicians who emigrated later on, such as Paul Hindemith and Lotte Lehmann, are now known to have done so not out of principle but because they were unable to make satisfactory accommodations with the Nazis. Everyone else—including Karl Böhm, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Walter Gieseking, Herbert von Karajan, and Richard Strauss—stayed behind and served the Reich.

Wilhelm Fürtwangler

Both orchestras were equally prepared to compromise with the Nazis, firing Jewish musicians and removing compositions by Jews from their repertoires. Nor did either orchestra undergo any major postwar denazification: Helmut Wobisch, executive director of the Vienna Philharmonic from 1953 to 1968, was known to have been in both the SS and Gestapo; Herbert von Karajan – who, as musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1956 to 1989, was one of the preeminent names in classical during the second half of the twentieth centuries – had also had Nazi ties. At least in the early decades after the war, neither institution was terribly open about its tarnished history, but the folks in Vienna were even worse than the ones in Berlin, keeping a lid on their archives until Trümpi finally managed to pry it off in 2008; both orchestras now have substantial sections on their websites fessing up to their wartime collaborationist zeal.

Herbert von Karajan

When Hitler came along, as Teachout notes, the Berlin and Vienna ensembles were considered the two greatest symphony orchestras on the planet; they still are. Each had its own distinct “sound.” But they shared, in Teachout’s words, “a nationalistic ethos, a belief in the superiority of Austro-German musical culture that approached triumphalism.” This was a conviction they shared with Hitler himself. One consequence of this attitude was that even before Hitler came to power, both orchestras weren’t eager to employ Jews. In 1933, Berlin had four Jewish players; in 1938, when the Nazis marched into Austria, Vienna had 11, all hired before 1920 (seven of them ended up directly or indirectly dead at the hands of the Nazis). Despite the institutional anti-Semitism, the famous Jewish conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter were able to work in Vienna for some time after the Anschluss.

Leonard Bernstein

We’ve spent some time on this website revisiting Leonard Bernstein’s enthusiasm for the Black Panthers and other radical-left phenomena. He figures significantly in Trümpi’s account, too. Despite the known Nazi histories of both the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics, Bernstein not only chose not to boycott them (a position in which he was far from alone) but, as Teachout puts it, “went so far as to affect a flippant attitude toward the morally equivocal conduct of the Austro-German artists whom he encountered in Europe after the war.” Writing to his wife from Vienna, Bernstein told her he’d befriended von Karajan, “whom you would (and will) adore. My first Nazi.” Writing to his parents, he acknowledged: “you never know if the public that is screaming bravo for you might contain someone who 25 years ago might have shot me dead. But it’s better to forgive, and if possible, forget.”

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Those wannabe Nazi courtiers

Yesterday, drawing on Jonathan Petropoulos’s fascinating book Artists under Hitler, we began taking a look at various German cultural figures who, during the Nazi era, chose not to flee their country and instead tried to find a modus vivendi with Hitler. In other words, useful stooges.

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Walter Gropius in 1919

Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, was one of these.  No, he was not a Nazi. “He detested their intolerance,” Petropoulos emphasizes. On the other hand, he was very proud of his German identity and – viewing himself as a man who was “above politics” – he believed he possessed “qualities that would enable him to flourish in the Third Reich.” Without complaint, he supplied Nazi authorities with copies of his family tree to document his pure “Aryan” heritage so he could join official arts groups.

Try though he did, however, Gropius couldn’t get a professional foothold under the new regime. He entered a design competition for the Nazis’ new Reichsbank, but lost. He entered another design for a recreational facility called the Houses of German Work – complete with four high-flying swastika banners – and lost again.

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Gropius’s design for the Reichsbank

Working closely with the Reich Propaganda Ministry, he did help plan an ideology-drenched exhibition called “German People – German Work.” But all in all, his career prospects proved to be lousier in Germany than they were abroad. So in the mid 1930s, he spent a good deal of time in Britain, where he worked with an English colleague on a building for a college in Cambridgeshire and designed lamps and wastepaper baskets for a furniture company. Later in the decade, he accepted an invitation from Harvard to serve as chairman of that institution’s department of architecture.

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The PanAm (now MetLife) building

During these first years in the U.S., Gropius refused to involve himself in anti-Nazi causes. When the war began, however, he chose to stay in America, and in 1944 became a citizen. He went on to design New York’s iconic Pan Am (now MetLife) Building and many other notable structures. He became, in short, an iconic American architect, whose attempts to ingratiate himself with the Nazis were dropped down the memory hole. Like several of the other stooges whose lives Petropoulos recounts, Gropius was spared the kind of postwar ignominy experienced by (say) Albert Speer only because he couldn’t secure enough decent work in his homeland to make it worth staying there.

Paul Hindemith was as important to modern music as Gropius was to modern architecture. Even more so, perhaps: by the time the Nazis came along, he’d been serving for some time as a sort of cultural ambassador for his homeland around the Western world, especially in America. As Petropoulos puts it, Hindemith hoped the Nazis would look upon his “sterling and increasingly global reputation,” as well as upon his background as a World War I veteran, and see him as a potential ornament to the Third Reich.

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Paul Hindemith

Like Gropius, Hindemith was no Nazi. Since he had a half-Jewish wife and Jewish friends, it could be argued that he wasn’t anti-Semitic either (although he never opened his mouth to protest the official abuse of his Jewish colleagues). In any event, he did what he thought necessary to advance his career under the Nazis. He signed a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler; he publicly badmouthed fellow modernist composers who were out of favor with the regime; and he trimmed his sails musically (retreating from modernism back into German Romanticism and post-Romanticism) to please his new masters.

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Wilhelm Fürtwangler

And yet none of it worked. Why? Quite simply, Hitler disliked his music. For a time, thanks largely to the support of Wilhelm Furtwängler, the revered conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Hindemith was able to keep staging his works. But Furtwängler’s support only kept Hindemith afloat for so long; after his inclusion in the Nazis’ 1938 “Degenerate Music Exhibition” made it clear that he wasn’t welcome in the new Germany, he and his wife finally decamped for Switzerland and then, in 1940, relocated to the U.S., where he taught at Yale for thirteen years. In a letter he wrote on the ship to New York, he said that if only he had “the prospect of a somewhat secure existence,” he’d gladly return to Hitler’s Reich. The reason for his departure, then, wasn’t at all ideological. As with Gropius, however, his timely getaway ensured that he was one German artist who, after the war, escaped the taint of collaboration.

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The ones who stayed

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Marlene Dietrich

When we think of top-flight German creative and intellectual types during the Nazi era, we tend to focus on the ones who understood exactly what Adolf Hitler was about, didn’t like it at all, and got out while the getting was good.

Whole books have been written about the tsunami of actors, artists, authors, architects, composers, and scientists that flowed from Europe to America during the 1930s. Among them were such luminaries as the novelist Thomas Mann, the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the film director Fritz Lang, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, and the actress Marlene Dietrich. Not to mention Albert Einstein himself. 

But there’s another group of German cultural eminences who (with a couple of notable exceptions) have received considerably less attention. We’re referring to the ones who chose to stay and work in Nazi Germany. Jonathan Petropoulos puts it this way in his recent book Artists under Hitler:Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany:

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Jonathan Petropoulos

The German émigré community during the Third Reich represented the greatest assemblage of cultural talent ever to leave a country. Yet the image of virtuous émigrés has long overshadowed the fact that a wide array of cultural figures who were trained or who worked in a modernist tradition attempted to find a place in Hitler’s Reich.

As Petropoulos notes, no two of these figures had the same politics going into the Nazi era. Some of them actually believed in Nazism to various extents, although several of them changed their minds at one or another point in the 1930s. Others were amoral careerists – former liberals or Communists who didn’t see a professional future for themselves abroad and bought into Nazism in order to preserve their careers. 

We’ll spend the next few days looking at some of these cultural figures – gifted Germans who, faced with a choice of escaping to New York or knuckling under to one of the most loathsome monsters in human history, somehow decided (at least for a time) that it was a good idea to do the latter.

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1919

Petropoulos, a professor of European history at Claremont McKenna College, devotes whole chapters to ten major names. But he also mentions several other stooges in passing. For example, Fritz Ertl studied architecture at the Bauhaus, went on to become a Waffen-SS officer, and ended up putting his skills to work by helping design the death camp at Auschwitz, and, later, the gates at Buchenwald. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a founder of Die Brücke – the famous group of expressionist artists whose work is represented in the world’s best modern-art museums – protested a 1933 effort by the Nazis to remove him from the Prussian Academy of the Arts by professing that he was “neither a Jew nor a Social Democrat” and had struggled to create “a new, strong, and authentic German art.”

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Oskar Schlemmer

Then there’s architect Oskar Schlemmer, who, after hearing that somebody had identified him as Jewish, was quick to assure a Nazi official that he could prove his “Christian-Protestant” background going back to the seventeenth century; when he was removed from his academic post, he shared his frustration with a friend: “I myself feel pure and that my art corresponds to National Socialist principles.” The great soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf certainly felt that way: she joined “at least three different Nazi organizations” (in addition to the Party itself), had “a close personal relationship with Goebbels,” performed for SS troops in Poland (where they were busy murdering local civilians), and probably had an SS officer for a lover. (She went on to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in 1964 and to be awarded the title Dame Commander by Queen Elizabeth II.) And Emil Jannings, who in 1927 had won the first Oscar for Best Actor (for The Way of All Flesh), appeared in Nazi propaganda films and was designated a “state artist” by Goebbels. 

As for the people to whom Petropoulos devotes entire chapters – among them such eminent figures as Walter Gropius, Paul Hindemith, and Richard Strauss – well, we’ll start in on them tomorrow. These are stories well worth knowing about men who, while freighted with artistic genius, utterly lacked the moral compass of people like Mann and Dietrich, who recognized that the only proper reaction to Hitler was to reject him, flee him, and – when the war finally came – take part in the fight against him.

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