Subverting the German Volk: Racial and Musical Impurity in Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues

Considering that the Nazis relied upon narrowly defined categories of race and art in an effort to cleanse German genetic stock and artistic culture, it is notable that the title of Esi Edugyan’s second novel, set largely in Germany and France at the outbreak of WWII, signals a violation of both racial and musical categories. The title, Half-Blood Blues, suggests the racial mixture of several of the characters (which contravenes dichotomous racial categories) as well as the blending of musical genres in the namesake song, “Half-Blood Blues.” The characters acknowledge that the song is not “true blues” because it lacks “the right chord structure,” but they are unconcerned since “blues wasn’t never bout the chords” (275). Thus the book title alerts the reader that the novel will challenge authoritative classifications by undermining prescriptive definitions of purity. In particular, the novel explores the implications of mixture for the original “pure” categories being violated—specifically, those categories that were understood to define German people and culture. The song “Half-Blood Blues” is the musicians’ subversive interpretation of the Nazis’ own “Horst Wessel” and it therefore constitutes a kind of dialogue between the German (“Horst Wessel”) and that which corrupts the German (jazz) according to National Socialist leadership. Ultimately, the novel’s exploration of racial and musical designations is a simultaneous examination of the customary formulation of Germanness (taken to an extreme under the Nazis). Half-Blood Blues challenges the foundational claims to purity that characterize the long-established conception of Germanness by depicting impure Germanness. By portraying blackness and jazz as unquestionably German and thus demonstrating the Germanness of non-Aryan race and culture, Edugyan’s novel subverts the conventional—and still prominent—understanding of Germanness and gestures toward the growing conundrum of Western European nations: how to reconcile black citizenry with a white cultural, national, and racial “heritage.”

Since the novel challenges German notions of purity, it is essential to understand how the concepts of “pure” racial, national, and cultural identity were constructed in Germany. The concepts of völkisch and Volk that the novel challenges are not simply a matter of what North Americans might consider racial or phenotypical whiteness. Translated as “folk” and signifying a people, a nation, and a race or tribe, the terms refer to the nationalist ethnic German identity that existed well before and after National Socialism. That this conception of Germanness has persisted for so long demonstrates its deep roots in German culture and consequently explains, in some small part, how Nazi ideology could arise. As Clarence Lusane explains in Hitler’s Black Victims,

For Hitler and the founders of the Nazi Party, the notion of race would be directly linked to the concept of völkisch, which translates into a philosophical view that embeds people and nation into one. … This popular notion of nation and people was the context that the Nazis could rely on in constructing a more fervent racial state and compelling, deadly anti-Semitism.

(26)

The complexity of this ethnic identity is also evident in the concept of the Aryan race: it, too, does not mean simply phenotypical whiteness. The concept of Aryanness is grounded in ancestral origins and beliefs about purity—namely, a Nordic or Indo-European racial heritage of “pure” bloodlines. Aryan whiteness, in other words, connotes racial and Germanic ancestry in a specifically pure form. The völkisch conception of Germanness is thus an identity that merges Germanic white racial ancestry and Germanic ethnic ancestry into a German national identity. This conflation of race, nation, and culture deviates from the practices of many other parts of the world (including South Africa and the United States as well as much of the rest of Western Europe) where simpler (though no less complicated to formulate and police) phenotype differences dictate race categories and where nationality is not race-based. Molefi Kete Asante explains that the “idea of Germanness makes cultural location a matter of symmetry between one’s blood and one’s culture. This is a biologically determined concept that is essentially alien to...