Negermusik ("Negro music") [1] [2] was a derogatory term used by the Nazi Party during the Third Reich to demonize musical styles that had been invented by black people such as blues and jazz. The Nazi Party viewed these musical styles as degenerate works [3] created by an "inferior" race and they were therefore prohibited. The term, at that same time, was also applied to indigenous music styles of black Africans.
At the time of the Weimar Republic during 1927, Ernst Krenek's opera of Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Plays) contained jazz musical performances that caused protests among some right-wing ethnic-nationalist groups in Germany at the time. In 1930, the American musician Henry Cowell wrote in the Melos journal that jazz interpreted a mixture of African-American and Jewish elements, stating that:
The fundamentals of jazz are the syncopation and rhythmic accents of the Negro. Their modernization is the work of New York Jews ... So jazz is Negro music seen through the eyes of the Jews. [4]
Such views were readily picked up by the Nazis. Their criticisms have included "gratuitous use of syncopation" and "orgies of drums". [5] More statements from the Nazis included such things as "artistic licentiousness" and "corruption seed in the musical expression" with "indecent dance forms". [6] They went on to scrutinize all modern music of the 1930s as a "political weapon of the Jews". [7] On 4 May 1930, Wilhelm Frick, the Reich's newly appointed Minister of the Interior and Education for Thuringia made a decree called "Against the Negro Culture – For Our German Heritage". [8] [9]
In 1932 the national government under Franz von Papen pandered to the Nazis by banning all public performances by black musicians. After Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933, the Reich's Music Chamber [10] was also created in that same year. This was then followed by a full legal ban on this music on October 12, 1935, across all German national radio. [11] This ban was spearheaded by the German Reich's radio conductor, Eugen Hadamovsky, who purportedly stated:
"As of today, I decree a definitive ban on the negro jazz for the entire German Radio." [note 1] [8] [12]
In 1938, the Nazis organized the Entartete Musik (Degenerate music) public exhibition in Germany, mainly held in Düsseldorf. This exhibition included a poster displaying a cartoon caricature of an African-American male playing on a saxophone with the Star of David on his tuxedo lapel. The overall theme of the exhibition was defamation of contemporary American music as "Negro music" and as another Jewish 'plot' upon German culture. [13] [14]
The "Swing Kids" (German: Swingjugend) were a group of jazz and swing lovers in Germany in the 1930s, mainly in Hamburg (St. Pauli) and Berlin. They were mainly composed of 14- to 18-year-old boys and girls. They defied the Nazis by listening and dancing to this same banned music in private quarters, clubs, rented halls and vacant cafés. [15] German jazz was offensive to Nazi ideology, because it was often performed by blacks and a number of Jewish musicians. The Swing Kids gave the impression of being apolitical, similar to their zoot suiter counterparts in North America.
On 18 August 1941, in a brutal police operation, over 300 Swing Kids were arrested. The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation of their leaders to Nazi concentration camps.
The 1993 movie Swing Kids gives a fictional portrayal of these same youths in that period in Germany.
Prior to the D-Day landings, during the German occupation of the Netherlands, Joseph Goebbels's propaganda ministry published pamphlets written in Dutch named "Greetings from England – The Coming Invasion". These pamphlets contained in-between statements, such as "old jazz-records" and a further full statement declaring "at the celebration of liberation your daughters and wives will be dancing in the arms of real Negroes". [3] This further equated jazz music with 'blackness' during this time to stir up racism and anti-Allied propaganda within occupied Europe. However, Goebbels managed to create a Nazi-sponsored German swing band named Charlie and his Orchestra whose propagandistic purpose was to win over Nazi support and sympathy from British and American listeners through shortwave radio. [12]
Additionally counter-propaganda was used by Allied forces which played upon the fears of the Nazi's banned music. One such example is Glenn Miller, [3] who was a White American jazz musician, that initially provided jazz music, through radio, to Allied combat soldiers for the purposes of entertainment and morale. His same music was used as counter-propaganda by AFN radio broadcasting to denounce fascist oppression in Europe with even Miller once stating himself: "America means freedom, and there's no expression of freedom quite so sincere as music." [16] [17]
Even in the post-World War II years in 1950s Germany, there were some protests from churches, school authorities and politicians against the "obscene Negro music" of the newly emerging rock 'n' roll genre with such acts like Elvis and Chuck Berry gaining new popularity amongst youth. [18] This attitude also continued right up into the 1960s carrying the same derogatory term that not only maintained its resentment by older generations and conservatives but also was an aggressive defense against a then new contemporary American culture. [19]
Degenerate art was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state-owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art.
Rhineland Bastard was a derogatory term used in Nazi Germany to describe Afro-Germans, believed fathered by French Army personnel of African descent who were stationed in the Rhineland during its occupation by France after World War I. There is evidence that other Afro-Germans, born from unions between German men and African women in former German colonies in Africa, were also referred to as Rheinlandbastarde.
Degenerate music was a label applied in the 1930s by the government of Nazi Germany to certain forms of music that it considered harmful or decadent. The Nazi government's concerns about degenerate music were a part of its larger and better-known campaign against degenerate art. In both cases, the government attempted to isolate, discredit, discourage, or ban the works.
The Swing Youth were a group of jazz and swing lovers in Germany formed in Hamburg in 1939. Primarily active in Hamburg and Berlin, they were composed of 14- to 21-year-old Germans, mostly middle or upper-class students, but also including some in the working class. They admired the "American way of life", defining themselves in swing music and opposing Nazism, especially the Hitler Youth. They loosely structured themselves into “clubs” with names such as the Harlem Club, the OK Gang, and the Hot Club. This underground subculture, distinctly nonconformist with a focus on African-American music, was active in the German youth scene. Despite being largely apolitical and unstructured, the Swing Youth were targeted and, in some cases, repressed by the Nazi government.
Adolf Ziegler was a German painter and politician. He was tasked by the Nazi Party to oversee the purging of what the Party described as "degenerate art", by most of the German modern artists. He was Hitler's favourite painter. He was born in Bremen and died in Varnhalt, today Baden-Baden.
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.
Charlie and his Orchestra were a Nazi-sponsored German propaganda swing band. Jazz music styles were seen by Nazi authorities as rebellious but, ironically, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels conceived of using the style in shortwave radio broadcasts aimed initially at the United Kingdom, and later the United States, after the German declaration of war on 11 December 1941.
Friedrich Blume was professor of musicology at the University of Kiel from 1938 to 1958. He was a student in Munich, Berlin and Leipzig, and taught in the last two of these for some years before being called to the chair in Kiel. His early studies were on Lutheran church music, including several books on J.S. Bach, but broadened his interests considerably later. Among his prominent works were chief editor of the collected Praetorius edition, and he also edited the important Eulenburg scores of the major Mozart Piano Concertos. From 1949 he was involved in the planning and writing of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
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.
Censorship in Nazi Germany was extreme and strictly enforced by the governing Nazi Party, but specifically by Joseph Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Similarly to many other police states both before and since, censorship within Nazi Germany included both domination and propaganda weaponization by the State of all forms of mass communication, including newspaper, music, literature, radio, and film. The Ministry of Propaganda also produced and disseminated their own literature over the mass media which was solely devoted to furthering Nazi ideology and the Hitler Myth. Crudely drawn caricatures intended to dehumanize the Party's political opponents and to inflame Antisemitism lay at the core of the Ministry's propaganda, especially in 1940 films such as Jud Süß and The Eternal Jew. The Ministry also promoted a secular messianic cult of personality surrounding Adolf Hitler with early films such as Triumph of the Will of the 1934 rally and The Victory of Faith made in 1933, and which survives now after a single copy recently discovered in the UK. It was later banned by the Ministry owing to the prominent role in the film of Ernst Roehm, who was later murdered in the political purge known as the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
Joseph Wulf was a German-Polish Jewish historian. A survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, he was the author of several books about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, including Das Dritte Reich und die Juden ; Heinrich Himmler (1960); and Martin Bormann: Hitlers Schatten (1962). The House of the Wannsee Conference museum in Berlin houses the Joseph Wulf Library in his honour.
The Reich Chamber of Music was a government agency which operated as a statutory corporation controlled by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda that regulated the music industry in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. 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.
American music during World War II was considered to be popular music that was enjoyed during the late 1930s through the mid-1940s.
The Reich Music Examination Office was an organisation within the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda whose role was to prevent the distribution of 'undesirable' music within Nazi Germany. In doing so, it worked in conjunction with the Music Chamber of the Reich Chamber of Culture.
Music in Nazi Germany, like all cultural activities in the regime, was controlled and "co-ordinated" (Gleichschaltung) by various entities of the state and the Nazi Party, with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and the prominent Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg playing leading – and competing – roles. The primary concerns of these organizations was to exclude Jewish composers and musicians from publishing and performing music, and to prevent the public exhibition of music considered to be "Jewish", "anti-German", or otherwise "degenerate", while at the same time promoting the work of favored "Germanic" composers, such as Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner. These works were believed to be positive contributions to the Volksgemeinschaft, or German folk community.
The Degenerate Art exhibition was an art exhibition organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich from 19 July to 30 November 1937. The exhibition presented 650 works of art, confiscated from German museums, and was staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition. The day before the exhibition started, Adolf Hitler delivered a speech declaring "merciless war" on cultural disintegration, attacking "chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers". Degenerate art was defined as works that "insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill". One million people attended the exhibition in its first six weeks. A U.S. critic commented, "There are probably plenty of people—art lovers—in Boston, who will side with Hitler in this particular purge". This particular take is controversial, however, given the greater political context of the exhibition.
Hans Severus Ziegler was a German publicist, theater manager, teacher and Nazi Party official. A leading cultural director under the Nazis, he was closely associated with the censorship and cultural co-ordination of the Third Reich.
En Canot is a Cubist oil painting created by Jean Metzinger in 1913. The work is referred to in various publications as Femme à l'ombrelle, Im Boot, Le Canot, En Bâteau, In the Canoe, The Boat, On the Beach, Am Strand, Im Schiff, V Člunu and Im Kanu. The painting was exhibited in Paris at the 1913 Salon d'Automne. The following year it was shown at Moderní umění, 45th Exhibition of SVU Mánes in Prague, February–March 1914. This "Survey of Modern Art" was one of the last prewar exhibitions in Prague. En Canot was exhibited again, in July of the same year, at the Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin. The painting was acquired from Herwarth Walden in 1916 by Georg Muche at Galerie Der Sturm.
The Reich Music Days (German: Reichsmusiktage} took place from 22 to 29 May 1938 in Düsseldorf. They were a Nazi propaganda event under the patronage of Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had originally planned an annual return of the Reichsmusiktage. These were held again in May 1939, but ceased to exist after the beginning of the Second World War.
Fritz Stege was a German music journalist in the era of National Socialism and composer of accordion music.
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