German Dance and Entertainment Orchestra | |
---|---|
Musical ensemble | |
Native name | Deutsches Tanz- und Unterhaltungsorchester |
Short name | DTU |
Founded | 1942 |
The German Dance and Entertainment Orchestra (German : Deutsches Tanz- und Unterhaltungsorchester; DTU) [1] was a musical ensemble formed in 1942 by musicians Franz Grothe and Georg Haentzschel [1] on the initiative of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. [2] It was an attempt to create an acceptable alternative to jazz, which was a popular genre among Germans but was considered a form of degenerate music by the Nazis due to its racial associations. [3] The self-styled "rhythmic dance music" [3] produced by the German Dance and Entertainment Orchestra was intended especially to satisfy the musical desires of military personnel, thus preventing them from listening to British radio broadcasts which also contained anti-Nazi propaganda material. [2] Walter Dobschinski worked with the ensemble.
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German Nazi politician who was the Nazi Gauleiter of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted acolytes, known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism, which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.
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The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles rapidly gained nationwide popularity in the United States. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. Originating in New Orleans as mainly sourced from the culture of the diaspora, jazz played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and its influence on popular culture continued long afterwards. The Jazz Age is often referred to in conjunction with the Roaring Twenties, and in the United States, it overlapped in significant cross-cultural ways with the Prohibition Era. The movement was largely affected by the introduction of radios nationwide. During this time, the Jazz Age was intertwined with the developing cultures of young people. The movement also helped start the beginning of the European Jazz movement. American author F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely credited with coining the term, first using it in his 1922 short story collection titled Tales of the Jazz Age.
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The Nazi regime in Germany actively promoted and censored forms of art between 1933 and 1945. Upon becoming dictator in 1933, Adolf Hitler gave his personal artistic preference the force of law to a degree rarely known before. In the case of Germany, the model was to be classical Greek and Roman art, seen by Hitler as an art whose exterior form embodied an inner racial ideal. It was, furthermore, to be comprehensible to the average man. This art was to be both heroic and romantic. The Nazis viewed the culture of the Weimar period with disgust. Their response stemmed partly from conservative aesthetics and partly from their determination to use culture as propaganda.
Nazism created an elaborate system of propaganda, which made use of the new technologies of the 20th century, including cinema. Nazism courted the masses by the means of slogans that were aimed directly at the instincts and emotions of the people. The Nazis valued film as a propaganda instrument of enormous power. The interest that Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels took in film was not only the result of a personal fascination. The use of film for propaganda had been planned by the Nazi Party as early as 1930, when the party first established a film department.
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The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Ministry of Propaganda, was a Nazi government agency to enforce Nazi ideology.
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Orchestral jazz is a jazz genre that developed in New York City in the 1920s. Early innovators of the genre, such as Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington, include some of the most highly regarded musicians, composers, and arrangers in all of jazz history. The fusion of jazz's rhythmic and instrumental characteristics with the scale and structure of an orchestra, made orchestral jazz distinct from the musical genres that preceded its emergence. Its development contributed both to the popularization of jazz, as well as the critical legitimization of jazz as an art form.
An overview of the evolution of Jazz music in Germany reveals that the development of jazz in Germany and its public notice differ from the "motherland" of jazz, the US, in several respects.
The Reich Chamber of Music was a Nazi institution. It promoted "good German music" which was composed by Aryans and seen as consistent with Nazi ideals, while suppressing other, "degenerate" music, which included atonal music, jazz, and, especially, music by Jewish composers. The Chamber was founded in 1933 by Joseph Goebbels as part of the Reich Chamber of Culture, and it operated until the fall of the Nazi Germany in 1945.
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