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The Third Reich and Music

Updated: 26/May/2006 14:22

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BERLIN (EJP)--- The exhibit “The Third Reich and Music”, which opened recently at the Neuhardenberg Castle Foundation, outside Berlin, features the Nazi attempt to manipulate music in a way that promoted their cause.

Two hundred items, including letters, music scores, films and recordings make up the exhibit that illustrates how important music was in National Socialist Germany. The exhibit, however, also shows how the Nazi regime’s music propaganda was contradictory.

Monumental music was to accompany monumental projects – from grand-scale architecture to huge military parades. Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner were Hitler’s favourite classical composers – their music laden with an ever increasing, slow build-up of glorious sounding, awe-inspiring crescendos.

Music to promote politics

Music was portrayed as “a freedom that was created to promote the political regime and not individual freedom,” according to the exhibit’s curator Pascal Huyhns – who cited Hermann Goering, in a Deutschland Radio interview.

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Music in National Socialist Germany played an active role in every aspect of German propaganda. It was rarely used simply as a background of an event or newsreel. Rather it was always front-row – a part of the ploy that was used as a means to arouse the emotions and sentiments of the public.

Huyhyn cited propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who said that his aim was to “fuse political and aesthetic values into one”. Goebbels successfully began this approach in 1935, when he pushed through a law, only two years after the Nazi’s rise to power, to give factory workers the right to listen to radio music during their work breaks – a right that quasi became an obligation.

The choice of music transmitted over radio waves depended on the political and military situation of the day. During the years of military triumphs, glorious sounds were transmitted – replaced by solemn sounds following military setbacks.

Contradictions

Ironically, the Nazis did not shy away from allowing elements of jazz (which they called “Jewish-Bolshevik-Negro music”) to be used in the mainstream music of the day when they realised that they could not sway mass public sentiments away from it - while simultaneously using other aspects of the same music to portray, in their opinion, the primitiveness and degenerateness of “non-German” cultures.

The exhibit does not only devote space to composers who furthered the Nazi cause – many of whom, such as Carl Orff, continued their successful careers after the war.

Music by exiled composers as well as those who died in concentration camps finds ample space at the exhibit too. The work and music that emanated from the Jewish Cultural Federation (Juedischen Kulturbund), the only organisation that was allowed to promote Jewish-composed music, is also highlighted at the exhibit.

The exhibit runs through 25 June. It is open daily, except Mondays, from 11AM–7 PM. Stiftung Schloss Neuhardenberg, Tel: 00 49 30 - 889 290, email: info@schlossneuhardenberg.de.