Cathcart Adam. Music and Politics in Hitler's Germany

2006. — 18 p. Madison Historical Review: Vol. 3 , Article 1.
In the years 1933-1945, Hitler’s Nazi Party [National Socialist Democratic Workers Party / NSDAP] used music as a tool to forge political unity
among Germans. Hitler and the senior NSDAP leadership instinctively grasped that among the arts, music was the most readily laden with ideology, and could inculcate both the youth and the masses with state-serving Bildung. Nazi music education, promoted heavily by and among the Hitler Youth, expanded along with concerns of “cultural Bolshevism,” and served as a Counterpoint to “degenerate music.” Once in power, Hitler moved to purge music and music scholarship of Jews in an effort to promote the unique origin myths of the German Volk and further saturate citizens with racial theories. In keeping with origin myths and racialism were the Romantic works of the composer Richard Wagner, a prominent anti-Semite who would assume supreme musical status in Hitler’s Germany. In such a personalized regime as Hitler’s, the dictator’s
tastes virtually defined official aesthetic norms. Throughout the period of Hitler’s chancellorship, the musical bureaucracy of the NSDAP would struggle to balance the tensions between art music (symbolized by Wagner) and popular demand for music such as jazz. These very tensions were also reflected in the musical policies of the German occupation of Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia, an occupation which simultaneously
plundered antique musical treasures and brought about demand for popular fare behind the lines. Ultimately the adoring songs of the soldiers – many of them graduates of the Hitler Youth - would transform into a dirge. German musical culture and education would thereafter split between the Allied-occupied West and the anti-fascist East. This paper will examine administrative, educational, and artistic aspects of musical policies in the Third Reich.