Beethoven in German Politics 1870-1989

DAVID B. DENNIS. Beethoven in German Politics 18701989. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 251. $30.00.

David B. Dennis's book is about the perception by German politicians of Ludwig van Beethoven (17701827) and his music from 1870 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. These dates are significant, for they symbolize the unification and reunification of Germany, respectively. It is interesting that, as Dennis astutely observes, such key events should have been coupled, in a signal fashion, with Beethoven's perceived political persona.

It would have been easy for the author to select as his theme what for most readers with commonplace, preconceived notions might be some sort of automatic association of Beethoven's heroic music with rightwing, nationalistic causes. Hence, it is to Dennis's credit that he has avoided such facile stereotyping and has searched, instead, for evidence of Beethoven's acceptance, mostly as a symbol of "Germanness," both on the right and left as well as the political middle. The degree to which the creator of the Eroica (1804) was utilized by almost all political and ideological factions in German lands even before 1870 is indeed astonishing. Dennis begins logically by showing how the historic Beethoven was anything but a consistent homo politicus. As a young man late in the eighteenth century, he was enamored of French revolutionary goals in his native Rhineland; from Vienna, he embraced Napoleon the Emperor, only to be disgusted by his vanity and schemes for European conquest. Dennis shows how Beethoven, of lower-middle-class background, fancied himself a member of the social elite by virtue of his artistic genius (at one time, Dennis implies, also by dint of the "van" in his name). Beethoven the composer aped the aristocrats around him, on some of whom he depended financially, while mistreating his domestic servants and demonstrating a distinctive venality of his own.

As the political spectrum in Germany defined and redefined itself in the decades after 1870, each political faction laid ideological claim to the composer. Dennis elucidates how imperialists under Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, left-wing republicans in Munich under Kurt Eisner in 1918-1919, democrats and hyper-nationalists in the Weimar Republic all adopted him as their spiritus rector. Beethoven seemed to offer something specific to each party: notions of fraternity to the left, a model of heroism to the right, even the moderation that goes with responsible citizenship to tempered democrats. To the aspiring National Socialists, who especially abused the composer as they abused Friedrich Nietzsche, he represented virtues of Adolf Hitler's catechism, above all heroism (the will to historic greatness; the will to conquer his deafness), struggle (both of the above, plus an imputed desire to fight against alien Frenchmen and for German unity), and aesthetic perfection (Beethoven's music as the epitome of nineteenth-century Romanticism, on which all Nazi-inspired composers based their epigonal works, in defiance of atonality or the serialism of the Second Vienna School).

Dennis raises a number of important questions, some merely rhetorically, because, as he rightly infers, most are unanswerable, short of using combined investigative techniques from musicological analysis, clinical psychology, and sociological theory. Why was no other German composer appropriated, since the middle of the nineteenth century, by so many ideological lobbies? Implicitly, Dennis suggests that Beethoven's music (and character) contained all the qualities that German aesthetes and politicians were looking for ever since his death, but to me this is too obvious and superficial an answer. If we can rule out Richard Wagner as useful to the left and Felix MendelssohnBartholdy to the right for obvious reasons, what about Johannes Brahms? Was his music not equally perfect as Beethoven's and his character not more virtuous (given Beethoven's many unsavory sexual exploits)? What exactly was the "German" essence of Beethoven's music (apart from obviously suggestive titles, dedications, and libretti), which Dennis detects as having attracted the political right (and not a few leftists); what was the essence of Beethoven's universal (international) fraternity, so appealing to the left? Finally, why did the Nazis concentrate on Beethoven after 1933 to an unprecedented extent, so that Elly Ney, the archetypal Nazi musician, styled her luxuriant hair and furrowed brow after the master's massive head whenever she presented herself on the concert stage, performing Beethoven, often sloppily but to great effect, on the piano?

Three additional considerations highlight the importance of this last and crucial question. First, the Nazi Party had trouble coming to grips with Beethoven's obvious physical deficiencies which, after 1933, might have warranted his being sterilized or even "mercykilled": his deafness, the effects of congenital alcoholism later in life, and, probably, venereal disease (with his swarthiness as an additional negative indication). Second, after 1945, conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, in his quest for de-Nazification, claimed that he had remained in the Third Reich in order to defend the ideals of the real, the secret Germany, typified by his idol, Beethoven. But how did Furtwangler manage to differentiate his Beethoven from the Beethoven of the Nazis? Third, in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, a prisoners' choir once performed Beethoven's music to the text of "Friendship! Comraderie! Solidarity!"; later in Auschwitz, SS guards ordered Fania Fenelon's women's orchestra to play Beethoven especially for them. Whereas, understandably, Dennis cannot resolve these contradictions, they do suggest that the image of Beethoven and his music had been constructed and reified as a phony metaphor of rectitude that was dangerously at variance with the originals. Dennis's important book provides striking evidence of this process over time, but a subsequent study still must explain why it took place at all.

Author Affiliation:

MICHAEL H. KATER

York University

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