Zwischen Österreich und Großdeutschland: Eine politische Geschichte der Salzburger Festspiele 1933–44 by Robert Kriechbaumer (review)

Rising from the ruins of World War I, the Salzburg Festival achieved an importance during the First Republic that has shaped its privileged place in Austrian politics and culture to this day. In his noteworthy addition to the history of the Salzburg Festival, Zwischen Österreich und Großdeutschland, Robert Kriechbaumer presents a First Republic whose top political leaders between 1933 and 1937 were committed to preserving and defending an autonomous Austria against the opposition of National Socialists inside Austria and, more problematically, from outside in the new German Reich. For those political leaders, the Salzburg Festival was the flagship Austrian institution, the ideological superstructure of the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg Ständestaat, and an unambiguous sign of Austrian resistance. When asked in early 1934 whether, in view of the random bomb violence being carried out by Nazi agitators in Salzburg the Festival should be held, Dollfuss responded, “Not to hold the Salzburg Festival would be equivalent to lowering the Austrian flag. Let’s keep this flag flying!” For Austrian political leadership, Hitler intended his first victim to be the Salzburg Festival. Of course, international politics and alliances mattered to this leadership, but in such affairs, the Festival could also serve Austria.

Framed by these premises, Zwischen Österreich und Großdeutschland draws upon archival records, reports of contemporary witnesses, and press accounts, among other sources, to present an extraordinarily detailed account of the functioning of the Salzburg Festival within the political constraints placed upon it. For the period from 1933 to 1937, the primary political constraint was the 1000 Mark Sperre, or the requirement instituted in May 1933 by Nazi Germany that all German residents of Germany traveling to Austria pay 1000 marks at the border, while from 1938 to 1945, the Festival’s primary political constraint became its subordination to Nazi German war leadership. With this political focus, Kriechbaumer might also be seen as offering a rejoinder to recent polemics that see a convergence of fascist Austrian and National Socialist German aesthetic ideologies at the Festival. The American scholar Michael Steinberg, whose perspective is now incorporated into the history section on the official Salzburg Festival website, expressed this argument pointedly in his book on the “meaning” of the Festival, writing that “the drive to cultural totality and the resistance to fragmentation and ambiguity […] emerges as the common denominator between Salzburg and the Nuremberg Rally of September 1934.”

Zwischen Österreich und Großdeutschland captures what makes the early history of the event so compelling, namely, that the Salzburg Festival stood for more than who paid, how much, and for what, but that it was also very much about money. In the aftermath of the 1000 Mark Sperre and its impact on German Festival visitors—in 1932, there were 15,700 such visitors; in 1933, only 900—money was on everyone’s minds. Already in 1933 pro-Austria campaigns, especially in the English press, helped compensate for this shortfall, though as the Dutch correspondent of the De Maasbode commented, guests from Czechoslovakia, France, Holland, Italy, and Switzerland, could also be encountered in greater numbers at the Festival than in years past. With the assassination of Dollfuss and continuing bomb attacks in Salzburg, 1934 brought new problems for Austria and Festival organizers, with the result that the Festival Committee doubled down on their efforts to recruit to non-German audiences. Using internal Festival documents, Kriechbaumer examines these efforts, which included proposals to target national audiences by having, for example, Arturo Toscanini conduct Zoltán Kodály’s “Hungarian Psalm” with the support of the Budapest City Choir, an idea approved by the Austrian Department of Commerce (Handelsministerium), but ultimately rejected by the Maestro himself. Here, again, Kriechbaumer provides a necessary counterweight to the work of Michael Steinberg, who, in arguing that the ideology of the Salzburg Festival was tooled as a rejection of pluralism, told his readers that “there was never any consideration of including Czech, Hungarian, or...