Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (review)

Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich. Pamela M. Potter. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii + 364. $40.00.

Few dialectics in the constitution of modernity are more inscrutable than that between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. The two are by no means mutually exclusive, as there is always the option to cast cosmopolitanism as a national virtue. Nineteenth-century German cosmopolitanism often depends on this trope. According to this discourse, the French, the English, and--in later versions of the argument--even the Americans know how to be worldly and international, but they lack grounding and a center. They have civilization but lack culture, and without a grounded center, the cosmopolitan spirit disintegrates into the allegedly incoherent internationalism of the traveler and the consumer. ¹ This rhetoric accords a primary place to music, which is understood to have access to the universal in the same way that German cosmopolitanism does: as a national essence and national virtue. Whereas outsiders may assume that the early romantic valorization of "absolute music"--i.e. music without text, program, or content--is straightforwardly universalist, the case turns out to be more complicated. The idea of absolute music, as Carl Dahlhaus famously argued, holds that only German music can be absolute and that absolute music is in the end about its very Germanness. ²

The nineteenth-century science that serves the nation is history; the science in service of the musical nation is musicology. Historical writing in nineteenth-century Germany is a prestigious but largely academic affair, focused on the powerful new universities conceived in service of the burgeoning nation. Musical life in general is equally bonded to the narrative of the nation, with Richard Wagner's controversial career at the forefront. The national and political importance of musical scholarship, a fascinating subject, receives its first sustained examination in Pamela Potter's book, which focuses on the period 1918-45. This is the period of Germany's shaky reconstitution as a postimperial republic and then of its catastrophic experiment as a postrepublican empire.

Narratives of twentieth-century German history continue to honor the Weimar Republic as an experiment in "classical modernity" and as proof that "Germany tried democracy." ³ No absolute wall separates Weimar culture from the culture of the Nazi period, however, and as Potter asserts, "it is important to recognize the seamless transitions in musical life from one system to another" (29). The scourge of anti-Semitism functions as the killer of cosmopolitanism, whose suppression in favor of reductive and oppressive forms of nationalism marks the fatal difference between Weimar and Nazi culture. Thus, cosmopolitanism and nationalism represent two sides of modernity. The sociology of professions and disciplines tends to reveal their self-essentializing and self-preserving aspects. German musicology provides a strong example of the seamless transition from Weimar to Nazi Germany.

Potter's excellently researched survey of the reconstitution of the German musicological profession after the 1918 defeat shows its vacillation between internationalism and a nationalism of ressentiment. This professional sociology is symptomatic and no different from the state of other professions in Germany. The founding in 1917 of the German Music Society (Deutsche Musikgesellschaft) seems, in Potter's analysis, to have hovered between the desire to rejoin an international community of scholars and to disavow it by claiming a national purpose. The GMS replaced the International Music Society, which had in fact been founded by German scholars and had disbanded with the onset of war in 1914. The ressentiment at work in the early Weimar Republic fueled anti-Semitism and caused a decline in the percentage of Jewish full professors (Ordinarien) from 6.9 percent in 1909-10 to 5.6 percent in 1931-32 (95). Such patterns inform Potter's interesting speculation that...