Ongoing Project: Ehrt eure deutschen Meister: Music Reception in the Völkischer Beobachter
In recent years, much work has been done on the connections between music and politics in modern Germany. Particularly in the area of National Socialist culture, historians and musicologists have been investigating how music practices were associated with party and state propaganda. However, hampered partly by what some term a "conspiracy of silence" among persons who contributed to the Musikpolitik of the Third Reich and remained influential thereafter, it has taken intensive effort to determine just which music makers, administrators, and experts collaborated with Nazi authorities. In order to set this record straight, scholars have hitherto concentrated on the administrative histories of National Socialist cultural institutions and biographies of German musicians during the period.

But work on the institutional background of Nazi music politics should be understood as a first step toward answering what I consider the central question pertaining to this field: as Michael Kater posed it, "What function did music have in a dictatorship that aimed at dominating the masses and then going to war?" To answer this, we must press our investigation beyond determining who was responsible for Nazi music policy and who executed it, to learn how specific composers and their compositions were incorporated into National Socialist pageantry, and to what effect.

In my book on Beethoven in German politics, I traced the history of the reception given that composer by political activists from 1870 to 1989. In it I examined how Germans have interpreted Beethoven's music to justify their ideologies and actions, thereby transforming art and artist into political symbols. Naturally, an important section of that book is devoted to describing how the Nazis incorporated this composer into their propaganda. To describe the process by which Beethoven was "nazified," I paid particular attention to how the Völkischer Beobachter promoted him. By reading interpretations of Beethoven in the principal Nazi newspaper, I was able to learn not just that party propagandists considered his music an important part of their program, but why they considered it so, and how they made it part of their campaign.

In order to insert more of these materials into our coverage of National Socialist music policy, I have examined every page of the Völkischer Beobachter from January 1920 through April 1945 in search of each major article it published on "serious" music. By "major articles," I mean feature articles that assessed music or musician in some depth, not just concert reviews unless these treated a composition or composer in a unique way or described performances associated with landmarks such as birth or death anniversaries or pivotal events in German history. According to these conditions I have gathered, registered, and studied 1008 major music articles from the Völkischer Beobachter.

Based on this collection, it my intention to survey the terms in which the Voelkischer Beobachter discussed every famous composer in the European music tradition, highlighting the ways in which the newspaper related them to Nazi ideology and policies. Ultimately, I plan to expand this study by comparing National Socialist reception of serious music with interpretations promulgated by other major German political groups in the early twentieth century. After fixing Nazi views--as communicated in the Völkischer Beobachter--I will undertake comparable surveys of music reception in newspapers such as the Communist Rote Fahne, the Socialist Vorwärts, the Liberal Berliner Tageblatt, and the Conservative Vossische Zeitung from 1918 through the early 1930s in order to produce a comprehensive study of the politicization of the classical music tradition during the Weimar period. Through this large undertaking, I hope to show the precise terms by which the music of major composers, especially the so-called German masters, were incorporated into German political culture and thereby, to a significant degree, learn how they were heard and comprehended by the German "popular mind."