Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (review)

Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. By Michael H. Kater. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xiii, 399 p. ISBN 0-19-509924-9. $35.]

Only two decades ago, it was nearly impossible to read about the activities of most German composers during the years Adolf Hitler was in power. Even The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980) had almost nothing to say about the period 1933-45 for most individuals whose lives had intersected with the political events of the day. For instance, the New Grove entry for Werner Egk does not mention that he was head of the composer's section of the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK) during 1941-45, and the entries for many similar figures likewise conveniently gloss over those same years. Beginning with Fred K. Prieberg's groundbreaking Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1982), however, there has been a growing body of work on the subject of music during the Third Reich.

Michael H. Kater, a historian specializing in the sociology of the Third Reich, has already contributed two books to this burgeoning field: Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Because the latter covered such a wide range of topics and included so many characters, no individual's story was told completely. The often contradictory evidence Kater presented also made it difficult to arrive at any generalizations about music in the Third Reich, and at least one reviewer felt the book lacked a conclusion. For these and other reasons, Kater wrote Composers of the Nazi Era (p. 265).

As a practical matter, the existence of significant documentary evidence--beginning with each man's papers--determined the choice of composers examined here. The order in which these figures are treated--Egk, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss--is purely subjective, with each covered in a separate chapter that may be read independently of the others. Some issues, like the premiere of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, are taken up in more than one chapter, and there are also frequent references in the copious endnotes to events examined in The Twisted Muse. A final, ninth chapter serves as a summary and also as a conclusion to Kater's trilogy on music in the Third Reich.

Each chapter begins with a critical estimation of the composer and some biographical information to situate him in the years just before the Nazi ascent to power, after which Kater carefully analyzes the interactions and dynamics between the composer and various individuals in the Third Reich. In his discussions, Kater proves himself a master at ferreting out the truth from the mass of contradictory evidence. He leaves virtually no statement by a principal unchallenged, frequently correcting historical assumptions. For instance, the chapter on Orff--pointedly subtitled "Man of Legend"--destroys the fiction put forth by the composer and his supporters that he was a "victim" of the Nazi regime. In particular, Kater thoroughly disproves Orff's assertion that he was a member of the "White Rose" resistance group in Munich (pp. 137-38). Such biographical "facts" were, of course, fabricated in the years immediately after the war by many individuals who underwent denazification trials. As Kater notes, the need for quick certification of artists who could construct a postwar German culture supportive of democracy led some of the tribunals to overlook such misstatements. (See pp. 23-26 on Egk, 133-40 on Orff, 177-80 on Pfitzner.) Consequently, many of those self-serving distortions have since ossified into "facts" that have resisted correction.

Even where there has been no deliberate obfuscation, Kater always pursues the most precise reading of the evidence to reach the best interpretation of events. For example, most historians report that Strauss's notorious letter to Stefan Zweig before the...