Musicology III Reich

Musicology in the "Third Reich": A Preliminary Report
Author(s): Anselm Gerhard

Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Fall 2001), pp. 517-543
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Volume XVIII Number 4 Fall 2001
The Journal of Musicology 2001 by the Regents of the University of California
517
Musicology in the
Third Reich:
A Preliminary Report*
ANSELM GERHARD
In March 2000 the German Gesellschaft fr Musik-
forschung took up a topic that had largely been avoided by established
musicologists until the 1990s. The last few months have seen the publi-
cation of the proceedings of an ofcial conference that, in its mixture
of methodological arbitrariness and marked desire to excuse the aber-
rations of German musicologists in the Third Reich at almost any
cost, must be regarded as noteworthy. We must read, for example, that
the romantic nationalism of the Poles essentially provoked Germanys
and Russias irredentism, dooming Poland in 1939;
1
must see the cul-
tural plunder perpetrated by the Amt Rosenberg in the 1940s in viola-
tion of international law reduced to the mere requisitioning of Ger-
man national treasures and explained as part of a desire for revenge
for 191418;
2
and must watch an internationally recognized musical
scholar, in the opening essay, shift principal responsibility for the intel-
lectual corruption of musicology in the years after 1933 onto those
who were not active at universities.
3
In the face of this, it is not hard to
* This is a modied version of an article that appeared in Ger-
man as Musikwissenschaft, in Die Rolle der Geisteswissenschaften
im Dritten Reich 193345, ed. Frank-Rutger Hausmann (Munich:
R. Oldenbourg, 2002), 16592.
1
Matthias Pape, VersaillesWeimarPotsdam. Die nationalpolitischen Vorausset-
zungen der Musikforschung im Dritten Reich, in MusikforschungFaschismus
Nationalsozialismus. Referate der Tagung Schloss Engers (8. bis 11. Mrz 2000), ed. Isolde
v[on] Foerster, Christoph Hust, and Christoph-Helmut Mahling (Mainz: Are, 2001), 30.
See also my review in Musiktheorie 17 (2002), forthcoming.
2
Ibid., 28.
3
See Ludwig Finscher, Musikwissenschaft und Nationalsozialismus. Bemerkungen
zum Stand der Diskussion, in MusikforschungFaschismusNationalsozialismus, 45. For a
detailed critique of Finschers polemic, see my Musikwissenschaft, in Die Rolle der Geis-
teswissenschaften im Dritten Reich 193345, ed. Frank-Rutger Hausmann (Munich: R. Ol-
denbourg, 2002), 18892.
the j ournal of musicology
conclude that leading representatives of German musicology tend to
express their discomfort with the history of their discipline more by
glossing over matters and by setting off German against anti-German
misdeeds than by critical reection.
But the conditions for serious discussions about the role of aca-
demic musicology in the Third Reich have never been better. The ba-
sic context can now be deemed tolerably well studied. Although the dis-
cipline managed to fend off troublesome questions about the past of its
leading gures well into the 1980s, we now know much not only about
the organizational structure of music research, its connections to the
youth movement, and the ethnomusicological research organized by
the SS-Ahnenerbe, but also about the careers of most university profes-
sors. Aside from a number of projects in local history (among which Pe-
ter Petersens contribution to the history of the discipline at the Univer-
sity of Hamburg is an early and excellent example of detailed archival
research),
4
we can point to three publications of particular note. The
rst is an important volume of commentary by Albrecht Dmling and
Peter Girth that accompanied the reconstruction in 1988 of the Dssel-
dorf Entartete Musik exhibition.
5
The second is Eckhard Johns seminal
contribution to the history of the discipline in Freiburg im Breisgau,
which appeared in 1991
6
and has since been supplemented by his
broad overview on music research in the Third Reich.
7
And the third
is Pamela Potters dissertation of 1991, which was published in an ex-
tensively revised version as a book in 1998 and in German translation
in 2000.
8
This state of research is indeed hardly satisfactory across the board,
as will be shown below, but it is nonetheless impressive. It thus seems
4
Peter Petersen, Musikwissenschaft in Hamburg 1933 bis 1945, in Hochschulalltag
im Dritten Reich: Die Hamburger Universitt 19331945, ed. Eckart Krause, Ludwig Huber
and Holger Fischer, Hamburger Beitrge zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 3 (Berlin: D.
Reimer, 1991), 62540.
5
Albrecht Dmling and Peter Girth, Entartete Musik. Zur Dsseldorfer Ausstellung von
1938. Eine kommentierte Rekonstruktion (Dsseldorf: Kleinherne, 1988).
6
Eckhard John, Der Mythos vom Deutschen in der deutschen Musik. Musikwis-
senschaft und Nationalsozialismus, in Die Freiburger Universitt in der Zeit des Nationalsozia-
lismus, ed. Eckhard John, Bernd Martin, Marc Mck and Hugo Ott (Freiburg [im Breis-
gau]: Ploetz, 1991), 16390; expanded repr. as Der Mythos vom Deutschen in der
deutschen Musik. Die Freiburger Musikwissenschaft im NS-Staat, Musik in Baden-
Wrttemberg 5 (1998): 5784.
7
Eckhard John, Deutsche Musikwissenschaft: Musikforschung im Dritten Reich,
in Musikwissenschafteine versptete Disziplin? Die akademische Musikforschung zwischen
Fortschrittsglauben und Modernittsverweigerung, ed. Anselm Gerhard (Stuttgart: J. B. Metz-
ler, 2000), 25779.
8
Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar
Republic to the End of Hitlers Reich (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998).
518
gerhard
reasonable to take provisional stock of the situation. After a hard look
at many publications,
9
including those named above, it seems to me im-
possible not to conclude that a large majority of academic musicologists
at least offered their services, or even behaved in such a way that we
must wonder whether tactical opportunism was really their primary mo-
tivation. On the contrary, there is much evidence to suggest a wide-
spread sympathy for the new powers and a belief in the necessity of a
national revolution. It is certain, though, that a diffuse nationalist
commitment to Germany is not ideologically identical to a National-
Socialist worldview. However, most scholars did not discuss such ne
distinctions publicly or privately, either before or after 1945.
The necessary data for a more comprehensive study are available,
especially now that the relevant university archives are, for the most
part, accessible. With respect to documentation, it is still necessary
above all to make progress in three areas. First, fragmentary evidence
seems to suggest that the large encyclopedic project Die Musik in
Geschichte und Gegenwarta project that from the rst volume in 1949
was a billboard for post-war musicology in the Federal Republic of
Germanyhad at least points of contact with a lexicographical project
begun under the aegis of the Hohe Schule led by the SS.
10
Second, the
collaboration of academic musicologists with the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter
Rosenberg needs to be claried with greater discrimination. In a book
that is now much esteemed, though its research is worse than sloppy,
the Dutch journalist Willem de Vries was able to document that Wolf-
gang Boetticher participated in the plunder organized by the Ein-
satzstab, something already known in outline.
11
But Boetticher gained a
xed university post only long after the war, and de Vriess evidence
519
9
See also the selected bibliography in Gerhard, Musikwissenschafteine versptete
Disziplin?, 2330.
10
See Willem de Vries, Sonderstab Musik: Music Conscation by the Einsatzstab Reichs-
leiter Rosenberg under the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ.
Press, 1996), 7984; Eva Weissweiler, Ausgemerzt! Das Lexikon der Juden in der Musik und
seine mrderischen Folgen (Cologne: Dittrich-Verlag, 1999), 5056. On the problems of
these presentations, see my reviews in Musiktheorie 13 (1998): 26669 and 14 (1999):
37274. This question played an essential role at the April 2000 conference; see Ludwig
Finscher, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Enzyklopdie Die Musik in Geschichte und
Gegenwart, in MusikforschungFaschismusNationalsozialismus, 41533. As it turns out,
the connections between a project of Herbert Gerigk in 1939 and the MGG are un-
proven, as argued by Thorsten Hindrichs and Christoph Hust, Schloss Engers, 8. bis 11.
Mrz 2000: Internationale Tagung Musikwissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus und in
faschistischen Regimes. KulturpolitikMethodenWirkungen, Die Musikforschung 53
(2000): 310. Whether musicologists should accept a nebulous state of research as a posi-
tive fact is, of course, very much a question.
11
Vries, Sonderstab Musik. See also the detailed review by Michael Walter, in H-Soz-u-
Kult 1999 (http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensio/buecher/1999/WaMi1b99.
htm).
of eager work done by university professors to steal art from occupied
territories is hardly conclusive. None of his proofs touches on anything
that went beyond such activities as help with the catalogues of musical
sources in public and non-plundered libraries. Third, it would be of
great interest to know more about the background on professorial ap-
pointments and decisions about research funding between 1933 and
1945. With such knowledge, it would be possible to judge to what ex-
tent decisions about personnel were politically directed, and by which
circles.
But even more than in the realm of documentation, we must im-
prove our knowledge of the subject matter and principal preoccupa-
tions of germanophone music research before and after 1933. If one
agrees with Helmuth Plessner that the ability of research to resonate
with National-Socialist politics and ideology is one of the most disturb-
ing phenomena in the history of German scholarship (a thesis sup-
ported by recent studies),
12
then it would be of great interest to recon-
struct the presuppositions of a kind of musicological research that
hardly needed to adapt itself to furnish a resonant sounding board for
the radicalized ideas of the new regime. A precise investigation into the
careers of individuals, into the history of the organization of institu-
tions (like the State Institute for German Music Research [Staatliches In-
stitut fr deutsche Musikforschung], reorganized in 1935), and above all
into the reciprocal relationship between individuals and institutions
can go beyond current research only if the years before 1933 are exam-
ined in at least as much detail as the 12 years of the regime of terror
themselves.
Of course, a comfortable approach that remains within the bound-
aries of the discipline will not sufce for an investigation into the his-
tory of musical scholarship focused on content. If we do not take
proper account of the strains of Weltanschauung and philosophy at the
general level, and do not make comparisons with neighboring disci-
plines (especially history and the scholarly studies of the various arts),
we can hardly arrive at convincing results. Future researchers will con-
front a major reading assignment, and they cannot limit themselves to a
few generally known titles such as Spenglers Der Untergang des Abendlan-
des or to the trivialities of Dilthey reception in the humanities recorded
by Potter.
13
They must be open to interdisciplinary issues and to issues
in the history of changing mentalities. Such openness has never been
520
12
Helmuth Plessner, Einfhrung 1959, in Die versptete Nation. ber die Ver-
fhrbarkeit brgerlichen Geistes (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1959), 12. See Otto Gerhard
Oexle, Zusammenarbeit mit Baal. ber die Mentalitten deutscher Geisteswis-
senschaftler 1933und nach 1945, Historische Anthropologie 8 (2000): 127, esp. 46.
13
See Potter, Most German of the Arts, 16668.
gerhard
front and center in the discipline of musicology, and it was repressed
even further in West German musicology during the second half of the
20th century.
All this is still a dreamed-of goal. Until now, scholarship has hardly
taken account of such issues, and even this preliminary report must be
content to review the details known about the external careers of im-
portant musicologists. For this reason, the following four case studies
will be used to develop questions for further discussion. The questions
revolve as much around the methodological problems of a disciplinary
history focused on careers as around the requisites for research more
strongly focused on content.
Heinrich Besseler
Heinrich Besselers sympathies for the New Germany must have
been apparent to any unprejudiced observer, even if rst allusions to
them in 1970 provoked a bitter outcry among his students and other
renowned members of the discipline.
14
As one of the few university
teachers in the eld of musicology, Besseler was a party member, though
only after 1937. And he was one of only a handful of musicologists not
to be further employed after 1945 by his university, the Ruperto Carola
in Heidelberg, which had appointed him in 1928 at the age of 28 to
succeed Hans-Joachim Moser.
At least since Helmut Heibers synthetic presentation of everyday
life in universities we have known that Besselers engagement with the
Third Reich went beyond the accommodation typical of the time, and
all indications are that an ongoing investigation of Besselers les by a
young musicologist at Heidelberg will conrm this picture.
15
Besselers
conspiring role as an informant on the activities of colleagues at inter-
national conferences is particularly unappetizing, as is his message
to the Reich Ministry of Education [Reichserziehungsministerium] in early
1935 that his colleague Johannes Wolf had always had very close
relations to those circles that the emigrants of today comprise.
16
521
14
See Clytus Gottwald, Musikwissenschaft und Kirchenmusik, in Bericht ber das
Symposium Reexionen ber Musikwissenschaft heute, ed. Hans Heinrich Egge-
brecht, in Bericht ber den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bonn 1970, ed.
Carl Dahlhaus et al. (Kassel: Brenreiter, 1971), 66372.
15
Thomas Schipperges, Die Akten Heinrich Besseler, announced in Schipperges,
Besseler, Heinrich, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine Enzyklopdie der
Musik, 2nd ed. (Kassel: Brenreiter, 1997), Personenteil, vol. 2, col. 1520.
16
Personal les of Wolf in the archives of the Reichserziehungsministerium at the
Berlin Document Center; quoted from Helmut Heiber, Universitt unterm Hakenkreuz, Teil
I: Der Professor im Dritten Reich. Bilder aus der akademischen Provinz (Munich: K.G. Saur,
1991), 236.
On the other hand, Besseler apparently exploited the opportuni-
ties available to him, even in 1934, to facilitate examinations for those
of his doctoral students classied as Jewish, and, as late as 1938, to
guarantee the publication of their dissertations. This is hardly an ex-
plicitly antagonistic act against the regime, but rather evokes the dic-
tum attributed to Karl Lueger: It is for me to determine who is a Jew.
Yet it did cause Besseler some trouble, and it was, along with other such
behavior, the subject of a party trial that Besseler himself requested. To-
gether with other more or less diffuse accusationsaccusations that
Herbert Gerigk, director of the Amt Musik in the Amt Rosenberg, took it
upon himself to disseminate
17
such matters were decisive in Besselers
removal as director of the Denkmler edition Das Erbe deutscher Musik,
in 1939.
Despite a ground-breaking study by Laurenz Ltteken, we know
much less about the ideological foundations of Besselers research.
There is still no study that addresses not only the institutional history
but also the content of his research, and above all its hidden effects af-
ter 1945. A volume of collected essays I edited tried to improve the situ-
ation by consciously focusing on the time before 1933 and on the
continuities in his vlkisch research on music.
18
Its conclusions are, how-
ever, too provisional not to declare openly that the need it addressed
continues undiminished.
The same applies to Lttekens important attempt to examine
Besselers ahistorical methodology. In Besselers approach, the music
of the past is interesting only insofar as its study is both called for and
supported by musical life as a whole, not because it possesses any intrin-
sic value.
19
Ltteken sees one of the central conceptual tropes of
Besseler, a man interested above all in the Middle Ages and the early
Renaissance, in the fact that music, a kind of anthropological constant,
can only properly be comprehended as an Erlebnis.
20
Because of the
uncertain state of research, Ltteken avoids unequivocal evaluations of
Besseler. Any judgments would, of course, also have to take into ac-
count that German historians of the Middle Ages attempted in the
1920s and 1930s to nd evidence of a thoroughly concrete epistemic
order, and that the idea of a new Middle Ages, an idea traceable to
522
17
18
Cited in n7.
19
Laurenz Ltteken, Das Musikwerk im Spannungsfeld von Ausdruck und Er-
leben: Heinrich Besselers musikhistoriographischer Ansatz, in Musikwissenschaft, ed.
Gerhard, 223.
20
Ibid., 218.
gerhard
Novalis, found particular favor after 1933.
21
Meanwhile, the assess-
ments made in 1994 in the last appraisal of Besseler will continue to
echo: political opportunist
22
and political chameleon.
23
Further pursuing Lttekens investigations, my thesis is that this
evaluation is not correct. The brilliant early writings of the 1920s, along
with statements in letters of the 1930s, reveal that Besseler was a
scholar deeply inuenced by his friend Heidegger, that he propagated
vlkisch and communal ideology with full conviction, and that he left no
traces of any attempt to distance himself from National Socialism. (It
must be remembered however that Besseler, like every other at least
marginally intelligent person of the time, did not nd every brutality of
the regime to his taste. In a letter of 7 May 1937, he permitted himself
the luxury of designating the German jingoism of the pushy and su-
percial conformist [gleichgeschaltet] sort as a facade and fashion
that would pass.
24
) Thus, on 17 May 1937 he wrote to his colleague
in Basel, Jacques Handschin, about his magnum opus, Die Musik des Mit-
telalters und der Renaissance (still esteemed today), but also about other
work written long before 1933 such as the biological-vlkisch inter-
pretation of the 15th century or of the Italian breakthrough around
1590:
It is entirely impossible for me to separate such historical events from
their vital base (Volkstum and race). The unity of life as a bodily-
spiritual-mental condition is convincing here as it is perhaps nowhere
else. This unity and integrity of life is, however, the central philosophi-
cal problem of National Socialism. I believe that this is recognized far
too little outside of Germany. Rather, people are content to believe that
German scholars are merely dimwits and characterless Byzantines
an easy way to fend off unwanted debates! Do you really believe that
National Socialism would really appeal to us beyond the political
realm if its weltanschaulicher kernel did not contain a mode of thought
that is simply appropriate [gem] and convincing to us?
25
In his brilliant Habilitation lecture of 1925, Besseler, just 25 years old,
had already developed the weltanschaulicher kernel of his personal
mode of thought, a mode inuenced by Heidegger. Amalgamating a
523
21
Oexle, Zusammenarbeit mit Baal, 10, 1920. See also Otto Gerhard Oexle,
Die Moderne und ihr Mittelalter. Eine folgenreiche Problemgeschichte, in Mittelalter
und Moderne. Entdeckung und Rekonstruktion der mittelalterlichen Welt, ed. Peter Segl (Sig-
maringen: J. Thorbecke, 1997), 30764.
22
Martin Geck, So kann es gewesen sein . . . so mu es gewesen sein . . . Zum 25.
Todestag des Musikforschers Heinrich Besseler, Musica 48 (1994): 24445.
23
Hans Eppstein, Ein Nachtrag zu H. Besseler, Musica 48 (1994), 353.
24
Ltteken, Das Musikwerk, 233n79.
25
Ibid., 233.
524
concept of experience as Erlebnis borrowed from Dilthey with
the vlkisch-tinged ideology of the community typical of the youth
movement, Besseler gave the commonly practiced [umgangsmig]
modes of hearing and thereby the communal auditory experience an
absolute precedence above the autonomous [eigenstndig] mode of
hearing. In the nal analysis, what was at stake were ethical hierar-
chies of value.
26
He explicitly disqualied the bourgeois concert that
had survived from the 19th century as aesthetically and ethically of
little value, just as he implicitly did for the individual, meditative expe-
rience of music. In view of the unconditional terms of Besselers argu-
ments, this cannot be separated today from our knowledge of a totali-
tarian terror carried out under the sign of a national community
[Volksgemeinschaft].
The very person who argued from the far right wing of the old
wilhelmine political spectrum, Hans-Joachim Moser (on whom more
below), called sharp attention to the hidden risks of such theses. In a
brutal polemic of 1926 he espied a vaguely bolshevist outlook in
Besselers argumentation, in which the masters from Beethoven to R.
Strauss are more or less signs of a rotting bourgeoisie, and in which
only the fetishistic value of music as magic is allowed to blossom
fully.
27
Although Moser did take back the ghting word bolshevist in
the exchange that followed,
28
one can clearly see here the positions of,
on the one hand, a nationalist Bildungsbrgertum, and on the other, of
a new approach to music history inuenced by the crisis of his-
toricism.
29
Mosers swaggering bombast may cause discomforteven
in a relatively circumscribed debate, he could not pass up the opportu-
nity to attack Jewish composersbut we cannot simply dismiss his cri-
tique of ideological concepts that later reappeared as part of the
National-Socialist rancor against the bourgeoisie. As brilliant as many of
Besselers ideas still seem today, it is dismaying to see how easily this
26
Heinrich Besseler, Grundfragen des musikalischen Hrens, Jahrbuch der Musik-
bibliothek Peters [32] 1925 (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1926), 3552; also in Bernhard
Dopheide, Musikhren, Wege der Forschung 429 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge-
sellschaft, 1975), 4873; quoted here from Besseler, Aufstze zur Musiksthetik und
Musikgeschichte, ed. Peter Glke, Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 740 (Leipzig: Reclam,
1978), 43.
27
Hans-Joachim Moser, Zwischen Kultur und Zivilisation der Musik, Deutsches
Musikjahrbuch 4 (1926): 30.
28
Hans-Joachim Moser, Erwiderung, Archiv fr Musikwissenschaft 8 (1926): 380.
Moser reacted here to a long footnote in Heinrich Besseler, Studien zur Musik des Mittelal-
ters. II. Die Motette von Franko von Kln bis Philipp von Vitry, 14546n2. Heinrich Besseler
had the last word, however, in a reply without title, Archiv fr Musikwissenschaft 8 (1926):
381.
29
Ernst Troeltsch, Die Krisis des Historismus, Die neue Rundschau 1 (1922):
57290.
gerhard
gifted stylist sacriced the freedom of the individual, won with such dif-
culty over the course of modernity, and how recent scholars, inu-
enced by the events of 1968, have admired such positions without due
reection.
30
Incidentally, Kurt Huber seems to have embraced a similar value
system with totalitarian potential. Huber was auerordentlicher professor
of philosophy in Munich as of 1926, but in the late 1930s was active
above all in folk-music research. After entering the Party in 1940, he
joined the White Rose resistance group and was executed in Munich
on 13 July 1943. Hubers bravery and the fact that here was at least one
musicologically active university professor who protested against the
terror without consideration for life or limb make it difcult to speak
judgmentally about the contradictions in his behavior. Yet if we look
critically at his writings, we must conclude that even Huber with his
German jingoism and his ideas about the biological conditioning of hu-
man beings, about a culture based on loam and soil, and about a Fhrer-
oriented national community [Volksgemeinschaft], in fact supported the
very ideology from which only Nazi fascism could grow.
31
Friedrich Blume
While Besseler must be regarded as one of the most charismatic
and talented musicologists of the 20th century, Friedrich Blume, seven
years Besselers elder, is an irritating example of a scholar whose
achievements as an original researcher are at variance with his inu-
ence as an organizer. As with most of his musicological colleagues,
Blume never joined the Party. He was, however, something of a virtuoso
when it came to the act of balancing spoken collaboration, cautious dis-
agreement, more or less hidden distancing, and power-conscious imple-
mentation of his own views.
Blumes monograph of 1939 is still a sticking point today, a book
with the title Das Rasseproblem in der Musik that grew out of a lecture at
the Dsseldorf Exhibition and that was reprinted in 1944. Just to
choose the subject was to lend credibility to a mode of research that
even Blume could not seriously have believed to be harmless, even if he
525
30
See Geck, So kann es gewesen sein.
31
Peter Petersen, Wissenschaft und Widerstand. ber Kurt Huber (18931943),
in Die dunkle Last. Musik und Nationalsozialismus, ed. Brunhilde Sonntag, Hans-Werner
Boresch, and Detlef Gojowy (Cologne: Bela, 1999), 12829. In view of this nuanced judg-
ment, it is difcult to understand why Petersen elsewhere sees it necessary to construe an
opposition between a value-neutral concept of race [attributed to Huber] and a norma-
tive one (119), or to dismiss Hubers exhortation to return to the true Germanic
Fhrer-state as a tactical statement (114).
did insist in 1949 that those who possess enough sense for the German
language must know what it meant in 1938 when one spoke of a race
problem.
32
Nonetheless the author expended considerable rhetorical
energy on emphasizing the methodological difculties and the unsatis-
factory results of previous work on the subject. Especially after 1945,
benevolently inclined readers could with some reason interpret this as a
scantily disguised aloofness from National Socialist ideals. Despite all
unease with Blumes virtuosic display of scholarly recklessness, even the
most critical reader must admit that although the 86 pages of this book
often bluster on about the preeminence of Nordic creativity,
33
there
is not a single sentence that could be read as a concrete anti-Semitic re-
mark. This must be seen in relation to the near epidemic of attacks on
composers such as Mendelssohn-Bartholdy or Meyerbeer that appeared
in most musicological writings between 1933 and 1945.
Of course, the potential if not intended ambiguity of Blumes
clever book in which the author virtually ridicules his Nazi sponsors
34
did not escape convinced National Socialists. A doctoral student in
Hamburg by the name of Max Singelmann, also an SS-Unterscharfhrer,
subjected Blumes study to a harsh critique in his dissertation. The cri-
tique now seems inevitable given Singelmanns aggressive National-
Socialist perspective.
35
What is surprising is the consequence of the col-
lision between two such positions. Blume had the audacity to seize the
role of attacker in this situation, and to see to it that not the doctoral
student but his advisor, the worthy Party member Wilhelm Heinitz, re-
ceive a formal reprimand from the Reich Ministry of Education [Reichs-
erziehungministerium] for the presumptuous and arrogant critique of a
colleague through the pen of a student. Even the rector of the Univer-
sity of Hamburg opined that it cannot be allowed that the presumptu-
ously and arrogantly stated critiques of a doctoral student be declared
t to print. In sum, the Ministry spoke its disapproval and had it noted
in Heinitzs personal les.
36
This astonishing result testies to the considerable inuence of the
dynamic Kiel professor in the formal and informal networks of aca-
526
32
Letter from Friedrich Blume to Arthur Mendel of 13 April 1949. Cited from
Hans Lenneberg, Editorial: A Personal Aside on a Discouraging Subject, Journal of Musi-
cological Research 11 (1991): 150n3.
33
Friedrich Blume, Das Rasseproblem in der Musik. Entwurf zu einer Methodologie musik-
wissenschaftlicher Rasseforschung (Wolfenbttel: Kallmeyer, 1939), 65.
34
To cite the evaluation of Lenneberg, Editorial, 148.
35
See Max Singelmann, Zur Erforschung lebensgesetzlicher Vorgnge aus der
Musik und ihre Bedeutung fr die Gegenwart (Ph.D. diss., Hamburg Univ., 1940); see
further Petersen, Musikwissenschaft in Hamburg, 63536.
36
Ibid.
gerhard
demia. In 1939 he took on a task that at the time must have been con-
sidered highly honorable: to prepare a three-page report on musicol-
ogy for a volume dedicated by German scholarship . . . to the Fhrer
and Chancellor of the Reich on his 50th birthday. Even here we nd a
careful distance from clear National-Socialist positions when reference
is made to the great problem of Germanic continuity that, along with
the similarly tangled question of the relationship between music and
race, might form in the near future an organized eld of German musical
research.
37
On the other hand, Blume adapted his entry to his spon-
sors more than his colleagues did. Aside from Blume, the only scholar
in the humanities to preface the name of his discipline with the word
German was the art historian Wilhelm Pinder. For all his attempts at
nuance, Blume envisioned in the rst paragraph a National-Socialist
musicology that can only start from the vital core of German music,
and that then lays further rings ordering the more removed problems
around this core.
38
One arrives at similar conclusions when one critically reads a lec-
ture given in Dresden on 20 February 1944 on The Essence and De-
velopment of German Music (Das Wesen und Werden deutscher Musik).
Despite the shortage of paper and the considerable cutbacks in the
penultimate year of the war, the pamphlet was still published before the
year was out. As was probably unavoidable at the time, especially in a
lecture series on Die Kunst des Reiches, it begins with a pathetic tremolo,
arguing that the times that threaten existence have tended to awaken
the greatest powers in human beings.
39
In view of the bestialities of the
regime, which in February of 1944 no observer could avoid seeing, this
wish can hardly be called sincere. Blume strives to reect on the foun-
dation of the being of the German people, and above all to ask what
this Germanness in music is, of whose existence we are all deep
down passionately convinced, and beyond that quite explicitly what is
the German calling.
40
It is natural to recoil from such soggy rhetoric, but in all fairness it
must also be pointed out that Blume calls the self-evident foundations
of a common historical narrative into question with surprising self-
condence. In music, writes Blume, the national origin of a type or
genre, a form or a technique is of little relevance, for music is to such
a high degree transferable that it is like no other form of expression of
527
37
Friedrich Blume, Deutsche Musikwissenschaft, in Deutsche Wissenschaft. Arbeit
und Aufgabe, ed. Bernhard Rust (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1939), 18. Emphasis added.
38
Ibid., 16.
39
Friedrich Blume, Wesen und Werden deutscher Musik (Kassel: Brenreiter, 1944), 5.
40
Ibid., 7, 14. Emphasis in the original.
the human spirit. . . . Each and every people has borrowed something
from the other and has rened what was borrowed. Points of contact
and overlaps are no exceptions, but rather the rule.
41
Accordingly, he
explicitly throws out the music-historical equation of German and
Flemish and, with respect to the 16th and 17th centuries, speaks of
intereuropean literature.
42
In addition to his critical distance from prevalent opinions, Blume
chooses and evaluates his repertoire in an utterly singular manner.
Mozarts opera Cos fan tutte stands next to Die Zauberte, despite the
frivolity which had been carped upon long before know-it-alls discov-
ered the Jewish heritage of the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte.
43
Further,
not only is Glucks name nowhere to be seen, but there is not even the
slightest mention of Richard Wagner. For a lecture given in 1944 on
this topic, this can only be characterized as eccentric. Nonetheless, we
cannot let the claim stand unanswered that Blume, in his distance from
the ofcial Nazi music propaganda, was guided by his adherence to
strictly scientic principles, as a reviewer in a British journal in 1947
wished to have his readers believe.
44
After all, it is all too apparent that
Blume was inuenced in a thoroughly unscientic manner by the same
nationalist ideas that the National Socialists had taken so naturally as
their own. Blume did not even recoil from the use of the concept prov-
idence, which had long lost its innocence through Hitlers abundant
use. Not only have we been sent by history into battles with others, not
only are we beset from without more strongly than any other people,
but providence has bequeathed us with the strength for these roles, so
that we have been equipped to bestow achievements upon the world.
In their highest forms (and in particular in their most specically Ger-
man forms), they stand without a doubt over those of other peoples.
45
Vulgarized Hegelian concepts, alongside citations from Goethes
Faust and his late poemUrworte. Orphisch, have to shoulder the weight
of the claim for the world domination of German music, which
Blume argues with a hubris that far exceeded the normal levels of
the 1920s.
In this forward development, German music always takes the last and
highest place, within individual periods as within the whole. If one
looks down at the whole of history, German music stands at the end-
528
41
Ibid., 911.
42
Ibid., 1415.
43
Ibid., 23.
44
Richard Freymann, Review in Music and Letters 28 (1947): 27980.
45
Blume, Wesen und Werden, 1617. Emphasis in the original.
gerhard
529
point of the European musical culture. . . . In this sense, it has ful-
lled the last and highest advance of humanity in the realm of music
to this point.
46
Blumes activities before and after 1945 will continue to pose
riddles, especially as long as the relevant les in the university archives
at Kiel remain inaccessible. Nonetheless, we cannot overlook the self-
condence with which a veteran of World War I who never joined the
Party made his presence felt in the two monograph articles sketched
here. His self-condence may have stemmed from the various inuen-
tial leadership positions he took on. In 1939, after Besseler had fallen
from favor, Blume took over the directorship of the Denkmler edition
Das Erbe deutscher Musik, a project of large proportions, as well as the
editorship of the journal Deutsche Musikkultur. In 1942 he became chair
of the ideologically important Neue Schtz-Gesellschaft. And sometime
between 1942 and 1944 he managed to claim the directorship of the
lexicographical project Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. However,
he did not manage to bag the prestigious professorial chair in Berlin
made vacant by Arnold Scherings death in 1941. The Leader of the
Regional Teachers League [Gaudozentenbundsfhrer] spoke out explic-
itly against a personality . . . whose main achievement is in the realm
of Lutheran church music. In a highly contested appointment pro-
ceeding that ended only in 1946, another reproach in the same report
proved even more damaging for Blume. He had been mixed up in the
plagiarism affair between the Riemann-Lexikon . . . and the Abert-Lexikon,
an unparalleled incident in German academic life.
47
(This accusation
will be discussed below in connection with Alfred Einstein.)
His activities after the war also show Blume more an effective and
power-conscious organizer than an original researcher, more a summa-
rizing lexicographer than an innovative scholar. It is clear that such
unquestioned and unquestionable qualities in the realm of managing
a scholarly discipline do not imply a closed relationship to denite
ideological preferences.
46
Ibid., 18.
47
Letter from Willi Willing to Erhard Landt of 18 June 1941. Cited from Burkhard
Meischein, Der erste musikwissenschaftliche Lehrstuhl Deutschlands Akademische
Rochaden.Vorgnge um die Nachfolge Arnold Scherings 19411946, in Musikforschung
FaschismusNationalsozialismus, 228. See also Potter, Most German of the Arts, 300.
Hans-Joachim Moser
Born in 1889 in Berlin, Hans-Joachim Moser managed to attain
professorial honors only during the 1920san interim period before
Besseler was appointed to the University of Heidelbergand again in
the short time between the end of the war and the birth of the German
Democratic Republic. Nonetheless, it is worth looking briey at his ca-
reer. His list of publications, already extensive during the Weimar Re-
public, leaves one little choice but to designate this prolic writer as the
leading disseminator of rabid nationalist views in music historiography.
Mosers fat Geschichte der deutschen Musik in three volumes, which ap-
peared in 1920 and reached a fth printing before the Weimar Repub-
lic was out, is still hard to stomach today on account of its decided
vlkisch and nationalist views. And its outspoken xenophobia and rejec-
tion of modern trends led to countless contradictions in method.
48
In 1933 Moser lost his position as Director of the Staatliche Akademie
fr Kirchen- und Schulmusik in Berlin-Charlottenburg (this will be dis-
cussed below), and after his attempts to return to academia failed,
he was forced to work freelance until, in 1940, he landed the nice lit-
tle job
49
of General Secretary of the Reich Department for Music
Arrangements [Reichsstelle fr Musikbearbeitungen] in Goebbelss Propa-
gandaministerium. Although Moser naturally did not hesitate after 1945
to pose as a victim of the regime on account of his discharge in 1933,
50
we must not lose sight of the fact that his activity for the Ministry can by
no means be called apolitically scientic. Rather, his task was systemati-
cally to de-Jewify [entjuden] the texts of several Handel oratorios, as
well as of all of Schumanns Heine Lieder, and thereby to contribute to
the destruction of Jewish traditions, if in this case only intellectually.
There is considerable evidence that though he had been in his own
words a Party Member since 1936,
51
Moser was anything but a con-
vinced National Socialist. Yet even before 1933 he expressed such ag-
gressive nationalist and anti-Semitic views that it is difcult not to see
him at least in this respect as a precursor to the destructive potential
and disdain for humanity that was let loose after 1933. The important
ethnomusicologist Curt Sachs, who in 1933 lost his position as aueror-
dentlicher professor at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin be-
530
48
Ibid., 2068.
49
Letter from Hans-Joachim Moser to Fritz Hartung of 11 April 1941. Cited from
Meischein, Der erste musikwissenschaftliche Lehrstuhl, 236.
50
Pamela M. Potter, Trends in German Musicology, 19181945: The Effects of
Methodological, Ideological, and Institutional Change on the Writing of Music History
(Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 1991), 287.
51
Letter from Hans-Joachim Moser to Fritz Hartung of 11 April 1941. Cited from
Meischein, Der erste musikwissenschaftliche Lehrstuhl, 238.
gerhard
531
cause of his Jewish heritage, underlined this point with all clarity in a
letter to Moser. In the bitter judgment written from New York, where
he lived at the time, he also expressly included many other German
musicologists who now wanted to resume contacts with him.
These men do not see that there is a straight line between the
staunchly nationalist man and the executioner of Auschwitz, even if
they are separated by a few posts. . . . Even you, like so many other
scholars, helped to prepare the mentality that nally led to the
slaughterhouses and gas chambers of the national concentration
camps. . . . Only when the German learns to love his home without
bellowing about the German soul and German humanity in every-
ones ears, only when he realizes that nationalist exhibitionism is no
virtue but a vice, only then can there be peace, for Germany and for
other countries.
52
Alfred Einstein
Of the four researchers individually presented here, Alfred Einstein
was the eldest, born in 1880, thus 9 years before Moser, 14 before
Blume, and 20 before Besseler. He studied with Adolf Sandberger in
Munich, the city of his birth, though for anti-Semitic reasons (naturally
only revealed in private correspondence) Sandberger never allowed the
promising student to reach the stage of the Habilitation.
53
Held back
from a university job, Einstein devoted himself to private research
activities, above all to the widely inuential Zeitschrift fr Musikwis-
senschaft. He was its editor from its inauguration in 1918 until his dis-
charge in September of 1933, and in addition wrote music criticism for
the Mnchner Post and from 1927 to 1933 for the Berliner Tagblatt. His
introduction to the rst volume of the Zeitschrift fr Musikwissenschaft
shows a clear national predilection,
54
though the sovereign stylist never
gave in to excesses comparable to those of Moser or Blume.
Although Einstein was never able to obtain a university position be-
cause of rampant anti-Semitism, he was of considerable importance for
musicological journalism of the 1920s and 30s, and it is not just for the
52
Letter from Curt Sachs to Hans-Joachim Moser of 9 April 1949. Cited from Pot-
ter, Most German of the Arts, 339.
53
See Pamela M. Potter, Die Lage der jdischen Musikwissenschaftler an den Uni-
versitten der Weimarer Zeit, in Musik in der Emigration 19331945. VerfolgungVertreibung
Rckwirkung. Symposium Essen, 10. bis 13. Juni 1992, ed. Horst Weber (Stuttgart: J. B. Metz-
ler, 1994), 6162.
54
See Alfred Einstein, Geleitwort, Zeitschrift fr Musikwissenschaft 1 (1918/19):
34.
quality of the work he produced in Italian and American exile that he
should be counted among the most important German musicologists of
the 1930s.
55
When considering Einsteins position in German musicology, one
cannot let an extremely unpleasant case of plagiarism go unmentioned.
The events are of no musicological importance, but do elucidate
Blumes failure to receive the Berlin appointment and Einsteins in-
creasing bitterness and exclusion from the musicological community.
In Stuttgart in 1927, Hermann Abert, together with his students
Friedrich Blume and Rudolf Gerber, published an Illustriertes Musik-
lexikon. In numerous articles, it noticeably paralleled Hugo Riemanns
Musik-Lexikon, the 10th edition of which Alfred Einstein had recently
seen to press. As Hermann Aberts literary estate is in private hands and
inaccessible, and as the records of a civil suit led in 1927 by Einsteins
publisher do not survive, we must exercise caution in evaluating the im-
plied accusations of plagiarism. This is especially the case with refer-
ence works, where the line between clear plagiarism and the use of gen-
erally available data is more difcult to draw than it is with strictly
academic publications. But from recently discovered records of Aberts
publisher, it is clear that the publisher saw his chances in court as
nonexistent, and, after a defeat in the rst court case, agreed without
delay to an extremely unfavorable settlement.
56
The fact speaks vol-
umes. Even though Einstein did not advertise the results of the clash in
scholarly circles, Blume seems to have borne a grudge against him for
the painful exposure, as one can see in exchanges from the 1950s (dis-
cussed below). Even Moser was involved in the affair, having attempted
in an external evaluation to counter what would seem to be well-
founded accusations of plagiarism, though by no means to Blumes
satisfaction.
Common Ground
The four cases briey outlined here have conspicuous features in
common. Certainly one of the greatest talents of German musicology,
Besseler was never advanced to ordentlicher professor in Heidelberg,
even though his personal les are full of indications pointing in that
532
55
See Pamela M. Potter, From Jewish Exile in Germany to German Scholar in
America: Alfred Einsteins Emigration, in Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from
Nazi Germany to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1999), 308.
56
See Robert Schmitt-Scheubel, Abert, Blume, Gerber et alii und das plagiierte
Lexikon, in MusikforschungFaschismusNationalsozialismus, 7987.
gerhard
direction. And even after 1945, there seems to have been no express
willingness among other faculty members to work to retain their col-
league, even though this could easily have been accomplished. It was,
after all, in his les that Besseler had given himself generous discre-
tionary powers in advising Jewish doctoral students. Two of these stu-
dents thanked him with steadfast loyalty. Ernst Hermann Meyer, who
had survived in British exile, was appointed ordentlicher professor of
music sociology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, worked for
many years as chair of the musicological advisory committee at the
Staatssekretariat, and secured Besseler the support of the state cultural
bureaucracy of the GDR. Edward E. Lowinsky, who emigrated to the
United States in 1940, arranged for the bestowal of an honorary doc-
torate from the University of Chicago in 1967. In addition, in spite of
his pronounced ideological positions, Besseler had serious problems
with the National-Socialist establishment, as the Party court proceed-
ings mentioned above testify (though its actual background is still not
clear).
As for Blume, as discussed above, both his behavior in the clash
with Heinitz and his brilliant career after his appointment as ordentlicher
professor in 1938 are only explicable if we assume that he had consid-
erable weight in the mostly informal networks of academic organiza-
tions. How else are we to regard the hypothesis, repeatedly advanced in
recent times, that Blume actually managed to deprive Rosenbergs
staunch follower Gerigk of an extended dictionary project even before
the war had nished?
By contrast, the academic establishment always limited Alfred Ein-
stein to the role of private scholar without academic honors, though
professional rivalry surely was at fault alongside the rampant anti-
Semitism of such circles. Nonetheless, in view of unambiguous source
information and the widespread disinclination among university pro-
fessors to accept Jews as colleagues, Einsteins obituary of 1952
strikes one as odd. It was commissioned by Blume from Hans Ferdi-
nand Redlich (another scholar forced into exile for racial reasons, em-
igrating from Vienna to England in 1939), and it states that incom-
prehensibly, the gates of German universities were closed to the
rising scholar of great stature.
57
It is even more disturbing when one
realizes that 12 years earlier, when the old accusation of plagiarism of
1927 threatened to drag down his career, Blume did not hesitate to
look back and see a plot by a publishing company in Jewish hands
533
57
Hans Ferdinand Redlich, Alfred Einstein zum Gedchtnis, Die Musikforschung 5
(1952): 350.
to defend its Jewish monopoly with the help of an extremely clever
Jewish lawyer.
58
Finally, Moser was discharged from his position as director of the
Staatliche Akademie fr Kirchen- und Schulmusik in Berlin-Charlottenburg
for reasons that are still not clear today. Similarly, the highly active
founder of the Cologne Institut fr Musikwissenschaft, Ernst Bcken, was
never advanced to Ordinarius, and the Director of Music at the Univer-
sity of Tbingen, Ernst Fritz Schmid (a leading Mozart scholar after
1945), was discharged at his own behest only two years after taking up
the position in 1937. While the published documents on Bcken and
Schmid say nothing, they are unambiguous with respect to Moser. The
enterprising man in his mid 40s was the subject of a disciplinary action
on account of a sexual escapade with a female student.
59
What the doc-
uments do not say, however, is that a denunciation had to precede the
action.
As so often in such matters, gossip is astonishingly well informed
and hints that an assistant loyal to the Party consciously intrigued
against Moser. Now of course we cannot give gossip the status of a his-
torical documenta type of oral history practiced ad absurdumand
we must by all means ask the critical question about the veracity of the
cheap sensational accusations against Moser. But something else is at
stake here. A not unsubstantial number of conicts as important as they
are difcult to understand must have been causedjust like many of
todays conictsby things of which we know absolutely nothing from
ofcial documents.
Even today the academic community is not free of intrigues, espe-
cially in a small orchid discipline, and it takes little fantasy to imagine
the gruesome efciency of intrigue in a totalitarian system of terror, es-
pecially one with competing circles of power. The decision alone to
send a scholar into military service or to classify him as indispensable
was not just a question of career, but often enough of life itself. One
wonders for example why the Director of the Musicological Seminar at
the University of Leipzig, Helmuth Schultz, had to take up arms as early
as 1943 (he was killed on 13 April 1945 near Zwickau) while the enter-
prising Walther Vetter, an ordentlicher professor of musicology at the
Reich University of Posen beginning in 1941, was called up only in Jan-
uary of 1945 (unchallenged, he was later Ordinarius at the Humboldt
University in Berlin from 1946 until 1958). This is also my main criti-
534
58
Testimony of Friedrich Blume from 20 October 1940. Quoted from Potter, Most
German of the Arts, 111.
59
Ibid., 339.
gerhard
cism of Pamela Potters approach, which takes too little account of indi-
viduals. In an academic community characterized by jealousy and
resentment, many decisions that at rst glance may seem politically mo-
tivated could easily be as much due to humanand all-too-human
foibles.
This point seems so important to me above all because, in compari-
son with other disciplines, academic musicology seems surprisingly
little contaminated by ideology, with the exception of a few stands taken
by Heinrich Besseler, Werner Korte, and Josef Mller-Blattau. The last
was a careerist with particular powers of intrigue. He actively sought the
discharge of his mentor, Wilibald Gurlitt, in Freiburg im Breisgau, took
an appointment at the Reich University of Straburg in 1942, and then
in 1952 regained professorial honors in, of all places, the Saar region,
an area formally sovereign but in fact controlled by France.
Some Propositions
At this point I would like to summarize with a few propositions:
1. Musicology is a small discipline and was even smaller in 1933
than it is today. At the time that the National Socialists took power in
1933, there were permanently funded professorial chairs at only four-
teen universities, often restricted to the status of an auerordentlicher of-
cial and at times unied with the job of university director of music. As
its status in the academic canon was not yet stable, even a half-century
after the rst professorial post was established, the discipline was espe-
cially prone to intrigues and cartels of power. Thus, in spite of the situa-
tion, personal loyalties were more important than political and ideo-
logical ones; patriarchal teacher-student relations had more weight
than factions born of internal clashes between rival groups within the
National-Socialist regime. Furthermore, these loyalties and relations al-
lowed forms of control to continue almost unaltered and without inter-
ruption. According to all oral accounts, for a long time this system hin-
dered two of the most talented representatives of the generation born
around 1930, Carl Dahlhaus and Rudolf Stephan, from developing
careers commensurate with their capabilities. Only when the discipline
expanded around 1970, bringing with it new departments, did such
cartels of power gradually lose their inuence.
2. Musicology is a German discipline. Up through the 1930s, aside
from a few marginal exceptions, the discipline was represented in uni-
versities only in the three germanophone countries. Furthermore, even
today, after the professionalization of academic musicology in the
United States, the British Isles, France, Italy, and many other countries,
there is a wide international consensus about an ominous claim of
535
leadership,
60
the claim that Arnold Schoenberg characterized in 1921
as the predominance of German music.
61
A tradition of musicological
scholarship that was rmly convinced of the preeminence of its own na-
tional heritage did not need to accommodate itself in the rst place to
the German jingoism of the National Socialists. If we compare, for ex-
ample, Theodor W. Adornos canon with that of scholars like Friedrich
Blume, not to mention Hans-Joachim Moser,
62
it is clear that such views
were independent of cultural origin and political preference. On the
contrary, scholars had perhaps more freedom of movement because
their national orientation could never seriously be doubted.
As this canon was linked not to traditions or to genres, but only to
great gures like Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms,
Wagner, Bruckner, and (as of the 1920s) Heinrich Schtz, even con-
crete references to the work of these classics could be preserved es-
sentially unchanged after 1945. What had been stylized under the
heading of a Fhrer principle was now changed back into the tradi-
tional forms of hagiographic historiography passed down from the
19th century. Of course, to have research interests beyond the ger-
manophone canon could have devastating effects on ones career in
the university. In Knigsberg in East Prussia, Herbert Gerigk completed
a Habilitation thesis under Joseph Mller-Blattau on Giuseppe Verdi,
63
who to this day is seen in part as a hurdy-gurdy musician by the Ger-
man Bildungsbrgertum.
64
As a result, Gerigk never attained a university
post, and it seems plausible that the aggressiveness with which he in-
trigued against the academic musicological establishment as director
of the Amt Musik in the Amt Rosenberg might be related to his blocked
career.
3. Musicology is a late discipline. With respect to its study of core
sources no less than to its institutionalization in academia, it is behind
by decades, if not by an entire century, when compared with the disci-
plines of history or literature. For this reason, the discipline resented
and distanced itself less from historicism than most other humanistic
536
60
See Anselm Gerhard, Kanon in der Musikgeschichtsschreibung. Nationalisti-
sche Gewohnheiten nach dem Ende der nationalistischen Epoche, Archiv fr Musikwis-
senschaft 47 (2000): 2425.
61
See Josef Rufer, Das Werk Arnold Schnbergs (Kassel: Brenreiter, 1959), 26.
62
See Anselm Gerhard, Zwischen Aufklrung und Klassik. berlegungen zur
Historiographie der Musik des spten 18. Jahrhunderts, in Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 24
(2000): 52.
63
See Weisweiler, Ausgemerzt!, 1719.
64
See Anselm Gerhard, Einleitung. Verdi-Bilder, in Verdi Handbuch, ed. Anselm
Gerhard and Uwe Schweikert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 11.
gerhard
elds. Even Besseler, whose manifest ideologicization of medieval music
can only be explained by a disgust with historicist methods, edited col-
lections of musical sources after 1945, even though he was less than
careful and tended to follow his own hypotheses rather than source-
critical methods.
For the very reason that the study of musical and theoretical
sources was and is of decisive importance in the self-understanding of
the disciplineeven at the outset of the 21st century, the fruitful edi-
torial achievements of independent research institutes were still being
compared to the questionable narrowing of the horizon in academic
departments
65
a large part of musicological research was devoted to
activities that could be molded to the National-Socialist ideology only in
a limited way.
66
What musicologists who remained in Germany between
1933 and 1945 could hardly have perceived as an advantage must have
been seen as a stroke of good luck after 1945, as a way to continue busi-
ness as usual without further disruption. In 1952 Friedrich Blume listed
the downfall of the Staatliches Institut fr deutsche Musikforschung in
Berlin, a pendant to the Reichserziehungministerium, as particularly egre-
gious among the heavy blows dealt to German musicology by the
events of the war. During its ten years in existence, this center of re-
search developed an exceedingly diverse and productive activity, while
German music scholarship has suffered an especially heavy reversal
through its dissolution.
67
Indeed, with the creation of the Foundation for Prussian Heritage
[Stiftung Preuischer Kulturbesitz] in 1957, this organization could be
reestablished as the State Institute for Music Research [Staatliches Insti-
tut fr Musikforschung Preuischer Kulturbesitz]. Yet of far greater impor-
tance for the development of the discipline in the second half of the
20th century was a tendency, supported by Blume, to focus even in uni-
versities on editorial tasks rather than on the discussion of historio-
graphic methods appropriate to music history. Germanophone musi-
cology all but ignored the American debate (more or less inaugurated
by Hayden White) about historiography and the postmodernity of the
1990s.
537
65
Ludwig Finscher, Diversi diversa orant. Bemerkungen zur Lage der deutschen
Musikwissenschaft, Archiv fr Musikwissenschaft 47 (2000), 11 and 14.
66
Ideological handicaps beyond those concerning the choice of repertoire to be
edited are only really evident in the collected works of Anton Bruckner begun in 1927.
See Christa Brstle, Anton Bruckner und die Nachwelt. Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte des Komponisten
in der ersten Hlfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: M & P, 1998), 12534 and 22127.
67
Friedrich Blume, Zur Lage der deutschen Musikforschung, Die Musikforschung 5
(1952): 100.
4. Music as a conceptless art was not easily subsumed under
racial and vlkisch concepts, or even measured by criteria of artistic
and political necessity. Many tried to explain European music history by
drawing on the spirit of contemporary studies of race, but they often
had to admit to themselves the difculty if not the utter failure of the
enterprise. As had Friedrich Blume, scholars could plausibly argue that
extensive research was still necessary in this area. It was a type of argu-
ment that had great tactical advantages, and not just to secure better
funding for a small and youthful eld.
To say this is in no way to excuse the behavior of people like Blume.
Rather we could come to the opposite conclusion. They should have
capitalized more on the freedom of movement apparently open to
them. But in comparison with other disciplines it is noticeable that only
those outside the university formulated overwhelmingly racist accounts
of music history, and that they could not pass muster with their seem-
ingly nationalist, if not to some degree National-Socialist, colleagues.
Continuities after 1945
It should be repeated that these conclusions can put a shine on
nothing. Even those who would avoid the self-righteous moral zeal of
some among the later generations cannot absolve their forebears: Musi-
cologists active in universities, no less than their colleagues active in the
Amt Rosenberg or in the Propagandaministerium, shared responsibility for
a discourse of exclusion and vlkisch terror both inside and outside the
country. As stated at the outset, it should be a goal of research to recon-
struct the responsibilities borne by individual scholars in connection
both with Herbert Gerigks project to catalogue all musically active
Jews, and with the theft of art from the occupied territories.
However, only with evaluative restraint, along with the propositions
laid out above, can we understand how it was possible that germano-
phone musicology in the two Germanys and in Austria could continue
without difculty after 1945 where they had broken off their work
before the nal collapse of the National-Socialist regime. Heinrich
Besseler became the leading member of the eld in the rst Workers
and Farmers State on German soil. It was hardly necessary for him to
modify his denunciation of individual freedom, the foundation of his
approach even in the 1920s, to be compatible with the ideology of de-
mocratic socialism. Thus, a collection of essays published in Leipzig as
late as 1976 praised Besseler for his impeccable logic of argumenta-
tion and, with respect to scholarly ethics, a laudable clarity in the con-
tour of his thought.
68
It is one of the many glaring ironies in the his-
538
68
Peter Glke, Vorwort, in Besseler, Aufstze, 5.
gerhard
tory of Besselers inuence that the author of this homage, one of
Besselers last students, defected from the GDR a few years later.
By contrast, Friedrich Blume acted as an unchallenged autocrat
and reorganized musicology in the Western part of the country. From
1947 until his retirement in 1962 he was president of the Gesellschaft fr
Musikforschung, a society he founded, and until his death in 1975 was
the sole editor of the monumental encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte
und Gegenwart (which grew from the four volumes originally planned
to seventeen). In addition to his overpowering clout at home, he played
a no less important international role, made substantially easier for
Blume by numerous invitations to the United States.
69
From 1958 to
1961, Blume was president of the International Musicological Society,
and after 1952 also the rst Prsident de la commission mixte of RISM, the
largest international collective undertaking in the eld of musicology.
Using his political inuence, Blume ensured that German musicolo-
gists received a maximum of public funds primarily for highly tradi-
tional philological projects, while the no less pressing discussion of
methodological questions was left for another day. It was no longer
even necessary to fend off new approaches with an emphatic stand, as
Blume had done vis--vis the race teachings of staunch National Social-
ists in 1939. They vanished of their own accord thanks to an unspoken
fear of renewed ideological contamination as well as the evident success
of philological projects in the era of the Economic Miracle.
After six difcult years as an emigr in Italy and England, Alfred
Einstein made a late career for himself in the United States, where he
took up an academic position for the rst time in 1939 at Smith Col-
lege in Northampton, Massachusetts. Although he continued to write
in German, even today his books are often only available in English.
For understandable reasons, the native of Munich wanted nothing
more to do with German musicology. He expressly forbade a biographi-
cal article on his life and career in Friedrich Blumes second lexico-
graphical project after the affair of 1927, Die Musik in Geschichte und
Gegenwart. To Blumes fortune, the publisher of the encyclopedia as-
tutely realized that it would not be Einstein who would be blamed for
the absence of such an article, but rather Germany and in particular
the editor and the publishing house.
70
Thus, as cynical as it may
sound, when Einstein died shortly before the volume in question was
edited for the last time, the tricky problem that Blume faced was solved
539
69
I am grateful to Prof. Reinhold Brinkmann (Harvard University) for this point.
70
Letter of Karl Vtterles to Friedrich Blume of 2 January 1952. Quoted from Ro-
man Brotbeck, Verdrngung und Abwehr. Die verpate Vergangenheitsbewltigung in
Friedrich Blumes Enzyklopdie Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, in Musikwis-
senschaft, ed. Gerhard, 361.
once and for all. By editorial principle, all living musicologiststhose
so arch-extravagantly honoredhad been asked to write their own bio-
graphical articles. After Einsteins death, Blume could without scruples
charge a third person, Richard Schaal, to write the article on his former
opponent in the plagiarism case.
71
Finally, Hans-Joachim Moser remained outside of university circles.
After an interlude as ordentlicher professor at the University of Jena
whose abrupt end in 1949 still needs critical study
72
he acted as direc-
tor of the Municipal Conservatory [Stdtisches Konservatorium, previously
the Sternsches Konservatorium] in West Berlin. As did other colleagues,
he tried to continue nationalist and vlkisch approaches to research
with light cosmetic retouching. As before, he tried to write for interested
musical amateurs in the Bildungsbrgertum, but he did not take into ac-
count that, as an outsider, he presented an easier target for criticism
than did his colleagues established in academic circles of power. Thus,
a strange thing happened when his 1087-page book Die Musik der
deutschen Stmme appeared in 1957. Even in the preface the author
lamented the ordeal of our present fate and confessed freely that his
work had occupied him almost constantly since 1937.
73
As he as-
serted, he took his methodological bearings from Joseph Nadlers now
somewhat infamous Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stmme und Land-
schaften
74
in an explicit attempt to distance himself from the theme of
music and race, recently so fought over, and to which his own book
stood in conscious antithesis.
75
Friedrich Blume must have felt under attack by this backhanded re-
mark, as he allowed the following anonymous notice to be inserted in
Die Musikforschung, the journal he had founded.
The board of the Gesellschaft fr Musikforschung has decided not to re-
view the book named above in the journal Die Musikforschung because
it wishes to distance itself in every way from the remarks in the book
regarding Judaism.
76
With good reason, Moser must have been surprised by this turn. Blume
used this unusual channel ostentatiously to parade the fact that West-
540
71
Ibid., 36162.
72
73
Hans-Joachim Moser, Die Musik der deutschen Stmme (Vienna: E. Wancura, 1957),
29.
74
Ibid., 14.
75
Ibid., 15.
76
Anonymous notice, Die Musikforschung 10 (1957): 334. For further details on this
matter, see Potter, Most German of the Arts, 25355.
gerhard
German post-war musicology had nothing more to do with its vlkisch
and anti-Semitic past. In so doing, Blume reconciled himself to the fact
that the declaration, for which he as president of the Gesellschaft der
Musikforschung bore at least partial responsibility, stood in a tensive rela-
tionship to the truth. For as much as one has to criticize Mosers idiotic
compilation for its misguided methodological approach, and as much
as one has to recoil from Mosers philological and not political use
of the concept of the German tribes
77
(which of course included
Flanders, the northern Netherlands, as well as all regions where ger-
manophone minorities had once lived), there are no actual remarks
about Judaism to be found in this book. With good reason, one can
raise ones eyebrows that Moser classies individual persons as Is-
raelite, Jew, Half-Jew, or Half-Israelite with insistent regularity,
but we would search in vain for a coherent judgment of Judaism. In
passing, he emphasizes the vivacity of the Prague Jewry (and more-
over in a thoroughly positive manner);
78
designates Arnold Schoenberg
as a decidedly Jewish master, for whom he lacks the ear to apply any
standard of judgment;
79
introduces Ferdinand Hiller as a representa-
tive of the pure Israelites of Frankfurt; and writes of Walter Braunfels
that as a Half-Jew, he will not be discussed with respect to the question
of the achievement of the people.
80
In their latent anti-Semitism, it is quite evident that such attribu-
tions are racist, if not overtly so. But nowhere are these associations,
tied with such painstaking neutrality to individual persons, bundled
together into a more fundamental statement about Judaism. As re-
pulsive as such blather is, it was unfortunately still a standard part of
German writings on music of the 1950s.
81
Other authors differentiate
themselves from Moser only in their greater skill in the art of anti-
Semitic allusion, which should by no means be taken as neutral. Thus
in Friedrich Blumes Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, we can read
in the article Deutschland by Rudolf Gerber (1954) that Meyerbeer
was in any case, prone to accommodate himself, while Mendels-
sohns art showed a wholly unromantic unproblematic approach to
form and his expression of feeling was objective and distanced, with
a tendency toward pose and sentimentality.
82
541
77
Moser, Musik der deutschen Stmme, 13.
78
Ibid., 552.
79
Ibid., 902.
80
Ibid., 339.
81
See Hans-Werner Boresch, Neubeginn mit Kontinuitt. Tendenzen der Musik-
literatur nach 1945, in Die dunkle Last, 3047.
82
Rudolf Gerber, Deutschland, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Kassel:
Brenreiter, 194986 ), vol. 3, col. 338.
To return to Mosers position in post-war musicology, it is in truth
odd that in 1997, in the second edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und
Gegenwart, Blumes tactic has been repeated. The entire responsibility
for the dark side of German musicology has been heaped solely on
this outsider. In the relevant sections of the article Musikwissenschaft,
Moser is the only person expressly named.
Through his excessive emphasis on nationalist strains, strains that af-
ter 1933 were coextensive and in cooperation with the ideology of the
National Socialists, the gure of Hans-Joachim Moser (1889-1967)
should be viewed critically.
83
The article addresses the network of problems discussed here only in
two further unconnected sentences, and thus glosses over them in an
incredible manner.
84
The nal judgment is, however, especially illumi-
nating. In words of some reserve, it reveals again the degree to which
this reference work, and with it a great part of German musicology of
the late 20th century, appears committed to a continuity with the rst
MGG, a work for which Friedrich Blume had been responsible:
The extent to which the corruption by National Socialism also intel-
lectually damaged West-German musicology after 1945 is open to
question.
85
(Translated by Keith Chapin)
University of Berne
542
83
Andreas Jaschinski, Musikwissenschaft. II. Grundri der Fachgeschichte, in
MGG, 2nd ed., Sachteil, vol. 6, col. 1807.
84
See Gerhard, Musikwissenschafteine versptete Disziplin, in Musikwissenschaft,
ed. Gerhard, 5.
85
Heinz von Loesch, Musikwissenschaft. III. Musikwissenschaft nach 1945, in
MGG, 2nd ed., Sachteil, vol. 6, col. 1815.
gerhard
ABSTRACT
Recent studies of musicology under the Nazi regime make it plausi-
ble to reach some conclusions, drawing particularly on four case stud-
ies: Heinrich Besseler, Friedrich Blume, Hans Joachim Moser, and (as a
counterexample) Alfred Einstein. First, musicology is a small discipline
and in 1933 was even smaller, making it particularly open to intrigue.
Personal loyalties were more important than political and ideological
ones; patriarchal teacher-student relations had more weight than fac-
tions born of clashes between rival groups within the National Socialist
regime.
Second, musicology is a decidedly German discipline: Into the
1930s, it existed as a university subject largely in the three German-
speaking countries. A tradition of musicological scholarship that was
rmly convinced of the preeminence of its own national heritage did
not need to accommodate itself in the rst place to the German jingo-
ism of the National Socialists. On the contrary, scholars had perhaps
more freedom because their national orientation could never seriously
be doubted.
Third, music as a conceptless art was not easily subsumed under
racial and vlkisch constructs. Many during the third Reich tried
to explain European music history by drawing on the spirit of contem-
porary studies of race, but they often had to admit the difculty if not
the utter failure of the enterprise. In comparison with other disciplines
it is noticeable that only those outside the university formulated over-
whelmingly racist accounts of music history, and they could not pass
muster with their nationalist or National Socialist colleagues.
Finally, university musicologists, no less than their colleagues active
in the Amt Rosenberg or in the Propagandaministerium, shared responsibil-
ity for a discourse of exclusion and vlkisch terror both inside and out-
side the country. Culpability must be investigated individually, but a
look at the eld as a whole makes it possible to understand how after
1945, musicologists in the two Germanys and Austria could without dif-
culty resume work broken off before the nal collapse of the National
Socialist regime.
543

Musicology III Reich

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Musicology in the "Third Reich": A Preliminary Report

Author(s): Anselm Gerhard

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