The Political Orchestra: The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics during the Third Reich

By Fritz Trümpi and Kenneth Kronenberg

This is a groundbreaking study of the prestigious Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics during the Third Reich. Making extensive use of archival material, including some discussed here for the first time, Fritz Trümpi offers new insight into the orchestras’ place in the larger political constellation.

Trümpi looks first at the decades preceding National Socialist rule, when the competing orchestras, whose rivalry mirrored a larger rivalry between Berlin and Vienna, were called on to represent “superior” Austro-German music and were integrated into the administrative and social structures of their respective cities—becoming vulnerable to political manipulation in the process. He then turns to the Nazi period, when the orchestras came to play a major role in cultural policies. As he shows, the philharmonics, in their own unique ways, strengthened National Socialist dominance through their showcasing of Germanic culture in the mass media, performances for troops and the general public, and fictional representations in literature and film. Accompanying these propaganda efforts was an increasing politicization of the orchestras, which ranged from the dismissal of Jewish members to the programming of ideologically appropriate repertory—all in the name of racial and cultural purity.

Richly documented and refreshingly nuanced, The Political Orchestra is a bold exploration of the ties between music and politics under fascism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226251424

Book preview

The Political Orchestra

The Political Orchestra

The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics during the Third Reich

FRITZ TRÜMPI

Translated by Kenneth Kronenberg

The University of Chicago

Chicago and London

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association).

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-25139-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-25142-4 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226251424.001.0001

Originally published as Politisierte Orchester: Die Wiener Philharmoniker und das Berliner Philharmonische Orchester im Nationalsozialismus. © 2011 by Böhlau Verlag Ges.m.b.H & Co. KG. Wien Köln Weimar.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Trümpi, Fritz, author. | Kronenberg, Kenneth, 1946– translator.

Title: The political orchestra : the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics during the Third Reich / Fritz Trümpi ; translated by Kenneth Kronenberg.

Other titles: Politisierte Orchester. English

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016012941 | ISBN 9780226251394 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226251424 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Wiener Philharmoniker—Political activity—History—20th century. | Berliner Philharmoniker—Political activity—History—20th century. | National socialism and music—Austria. | National socialism and music. | Orchestra—Political activity—History—20th century. | Music—Political aspects—Austria—History—20th century. | Music—Political aspects—Germany—History—20th century.

Classification: lcc ml28.v4 w54413 2016 | ddc 784.206/043155—dc23 lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016012941

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Two Cities, Two Orchestras: An Introduction

1  Innovation versus Tradition: The Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century

2  Differing Responses to Increased State Influence: The Orchestras during the Republics (1918–1933)

3  Continuous Radicalization under Austrofascism and National Socialism

4  Dependence and Protection under National Socialism

5  The Orchestras’ Multifaceted Media Presence

6  Repertoire and Politicization: National Socialism and the Politics of Programming

Summary and Conclusion: A Rivalry Like That between the Berliners and the Viennese Will Always Exist

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Repertoire—Graphs and Commentary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Two Cities, Two Orchestras: An Introduction

Let me state my point by the method of exaggeration: my aversion from music rests on political grounds. Hans Castorp could not refrain from slapping his knee as he exclaimed that never in all his life before had he heard the like.

THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain

So who was worse? The Berliners or the Viennese? And was Wagner the only composer they performed? But that was under Furtwängler, wasn’t it? The subject of my book elicited considerable curiosity in Vienna, giving rise to these and similar questions. There were also half-joking warnings, such as, Now don’t you go denouncing my Philharmonic! or a heated, You go show it to this Nazi orchestra! Colleagues in Berlin, on the other hand, while not uninterested, often expressed their curiosity in more uninvolved and neutral terms: Well, that sounds interesting. Although the people in Vienna to whom I talked generally had a much more immediate relationship to the Vienna Philharmonic—both positive and negative—my friends in Berlin were less interested in the Berlin Philharmonic as such than in the topic of music under National Socialism in general.

These very different responses point to the divergent symbolic valences of the two orchestras: for the Viennese, the Vienna Philharmonic is emotionally charged in a way that the Berlin Philharmonic simply is not in Berlin. That the Viennese public would elaborate a natural monopoly of musicality,¹ as Theodor Adorno once formulated it, became clear to me in the process of researching and writing this book in these two cities.

These days, one clear difference between the two orchestras is in their representation in the media. The Berlin Philharmonic is viewed as the embodiment of a German sound, and it is both viewed within a national context and seen as representing the nation to itself and the world. The Vienna Philharmonic, by contrast, is associated with all that is Vienna and with Vienna as the music city par excellence.

In 2006 a hot debate erupted over the German sound of the Berlin Philharmonic, which emerged from a polemic against the principal conductor of the orchestra, Simon Rattle, from Great Britain. The journalist Axel Brüggemann, who initiated the polemic, stated that under Rattle’s baton the orchestra had lost its soul-seeking romantic sound; now, he averred, other ensembles could play in black, red, and gold better than the Berlin Philharmonic.² But even at the end of 2008, after the debate had long been deemed to have subsided, the pain of its aftereffects was still palpable. Rattle, according to one journalist writing in Die Zeit,³ had not driven the German sound out of the orchestra, and the hysteria that generated the debate had been pulled out of thin air: Rather, the principal conductor conjured up a sound that was so seamless, played with grand gestures, infused with lush ritardandi, as if he were trying to join Furtwängler’s dimensionality with Karajan’s beautiful sound.⁴

On the occasion of a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo explained, with more than a little admiration, what this German sound consisted of: First of all, it has to do with a particular earnestness of performance, by which I do not necessarily mean strictness. But the German symphonic tradition lays claim to a philosophical access to the world. This includes brilliance and a particular madness that can be observed in German conductors. German madness breaks through barriers, not to destroy something but rather to make it accessible. It is a madness that makes everything expressive.⁵

The vast majority of the numerous publications that have examined this German sound from a musical perspective have echoed such essentialist explanations. However, a few writers have at least partially viewed it as a construct. For example, the conductor Daniel Barenboim, tried to teach his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra how to produce the German sound as follows: I can explain to you precisely what one has to do so that an orchestra will produce this German sound. It depends on how one begins a tone. Not always accentuated and not hard. It also depends on maintaining the tone to the end. That one does not change its character during a rhythmic figure. And if one encounters sixteenths or rapid eighths, that one does not automatically play with emphasis. That’s when I say, ‘leave your eighths machine at home.’ Not: Takatakatakataka.⁶ For Barenboim, too, the German sound had quite simply become the standard of good music-making.

The Vienna Philharmonic, by contrast, hews neither to the German sound nor even an Austrian one. It has its own Vienna sound. The orchestra’s website makes clear that, contrary to international practices, the Vienna Philharmonic continues to play older types of instruments.⁷ As a result, so the website stated until recently, the orchestra produces that orchestral sound which largely retains the elements of sound that the great composers of Viennese classicism, Viennese romanticism, and the Vienna school would have heard when they created their works. But since the relaunch of its website in early 2013, the orchestra has been more restrained in its identification with the Vienna sound, not least for political reasons.⁸ And this seeming reorientation is in some respects significant: an historical decoding of these seemingly innocently yoked words—Vienna sound—of which this book frequently avails itself, reveals their political content, and it seems more than likely that the orchestra has in the intervening years become fully conscious of their implications.

Empirical Vienna sound research—Vienna boasts its own Institute of Music Acoustics, which is attached to the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna⁹—has, among other things, tried to demonstrate by means of sound experiments that what is distinctly Viennese about the music-making of the Vienna Philharmonic can be isolated and identified:

In order to determine whether what is distinctly Viennese is recognizable on recordings, a large-scale scientific study was conducted in which hundreds of professional musicians, amateur musicians, music students, and music lovers took part. In addition to more than 500 Austrians, groups of musicians in Athens, Paris, Warsaw, and Prague also responded to the sound questionnaire, as did colleagues at Deutsche Grammophon in Berlin and Hamburg. The question was whether it was possible to distinguish between two identical passages of music which had been played by the Vienna Philharmonic and another orchestra, and if possible, to name the characteristics that distinguished the Viennese orchestra.¹⁰

It did not prove possible to classify unambiguously what was distinctly Viennese.

The different descriptions—German for the Berlin Philharmonic and Viennese for the Vienna Philharmonic—have a long history. The present work seeks to understand these appellations as the result of an image branding process that began in the orchestras toward the end of the nineteenth century and accelerated rapidly at the beginning of the republican era, the period of parliamentary reform between 1918 and 1933 in Germany and between 1919 and 1934 in Austria. Today, both orchestras once again tout their unique brands.¹¹ Because the genesis and development of this branding process were so closely linked to the political history of Germany and Austria, I will in the following chapters describe and analyze them in terms of the politicization of the two orchestras.

While the Berlin Philharmonic, which was founded in 1882, was historically associated with the Made in Germany label,¹² the Vienna Philharmonic, which played its first concerts in 1842—that is, before the democratic movement of March 1848 (the so-called Vormärz period)—early on became the standard-bearer of the music city Vienna label.¹³ The histories of the two orchestras can thus also be viewed as a history of their labels or brands. And these labels, in turn, also touch on Central European power politics in the nineteenth century. Austria-Hungary and Prussia were rivals for preeminence within the German Confederation; after a series of Habsburg foreign-policy defeats, the founding of the German Reich in 1870–71 was based on a small German solution, which established Prussia as a major European power in relation to a considerably weakened Austria-Hungary. The elaboration of the music city Vienna topos may be viewed in this connection: it may be seen as an attempt to compensate for diminished power in foreign affairs by positing Austrian cultural superiority.¹⁴ Especially noteworthy is that the music city topos was a backward-looking construct. According to Martina Nußbaumer, it had since the beginning been strongly retrospective and antimodern; in addition, the increase in essentialist founding stories and descriptions that went into the music city topos at the end of the nineteenth century considerably reinforced antimodernism.¹⁵ Ever since the Christian Socialist era in Vienna, that is, largely the era during which the anti-Semite Karl Lueger was mayor of Vienna (1897–1910), music increasingly came to be used as an apolitical strategy of appeasement by appealing to a nostalgic ‘Old Vienna’ cover.¹⁶ Wolfgang Kos and Christian Rapp have emphasized that Old Vienna is not a precise designation but rather represents a myth that embodies the notion that Vienna had in a virtuosic manner stored within itself traces of the supposed ‘good old days.’ In fact, there had never been a single Old Vienna; each era had elaborated its own. Memories of Old Vienna became fashionable shortly after the demolition of the city’s fortifications (1857) and during the Ringstraße project. The arguments around the Old Vienna debate have not changed much since then; they may be summed up as Whoever demolishes and modernizes is brutal and destroys the soul of the city.¹⁷

The associated compensatory strategy previously mentioned received further impetus in 1918, when Austria-Hungary, the former great power, was reduced to the status of a small state, and then again in March 1938, when Nazi Germany incorporated Austria to form Greater Germany in what is known as the Anschluss (annexation). At the very latest since 1870–71, competition with Berlin had been a hallmark of Vienna’s image, and it was largely continuous with the music city topos.

This competitive relationship was not, however, reciprocal from the outset. Austria-Hungary was for a long time viewed by the German Reich less as a rival than as a stabilizing factor for its global ambitions.¹⁸ The weakened Danube monarchy was never a true competitor of Germany’s; its real challenger on the world stage was England, Europe’s preeminent economic and colonial powerhouse. Germany developed its global foreign policies to break British hegemony, hoping thereby to procure its deserved place among world empires.¹⁹ The Made in Germany label embodied this foreign policy offensive at the economic level, as did the expansion of Germany’s naval fleet after 1897 at the military level.²⁰ This striving for world-power status was an ongoing element of politics during the German Kaiserreich. After World War I, Germany’s ambitions were set aside for a time, if only because of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. But then, at the latest in the early 1930s, Germany’s hegemonic claims reemerged, becoming all the more strident and culminating in the criminal policy of conquest of the Nazi regime.

I will show how the histories of the Vienna and the Berlin Philharmonics are closely intertwined with the foreign-policy histories of Germany and Austria and how the ways in which the orchestras were instrumentalized were therefore politically determined from the outset. This is where the present work attempts to make its contribution: asking questions about the different forms of political involvement from which, in my view, the then ongoing politicization of the two orchestras may be gauged. These questions revolve around which political exigencies and perspectives molded their programs and concert practices and how in many respects these influenced the performance of music.

The period of National Socialism is central to this examination, and the reason for this is twofold.

First, to the extent that it was characterized by the primacy of politics, National Socialism, like other political ideologies before it, exerted its political influence on both orchestras in terms of organizational form and musical practice. If it may be said that cultural politics and policies during the interwar years can be viewed as having aimed primarily at promoting culture, under the Nazis they became an instrument in the state’s cultural-propaganda campaigns.²¹ The politics of music versus music as politics—that, in my opinion, is the actual break that occurred in music when political power was transferred to Hitler. It is my intention to understand this break and to examine its effects on both orchestras.

Second, and crucially, the framework within which the competition between the two cities and the two orchestras existed changed fundamentally during the Nazi era. The previous interstate competition was transformed into a competition between domestic rivals once Austria was annexed to Germany in March 1938. This did not, however, diminish competitive impulses; rather, in some ways it increased them on both sides. To a certain extent, this can be attributed to the Führer principle, by which political authority was imposed top to bottom throughout the hierarchy, one of the bedrocks of Nazi rule.²² At the time, Joseph Goebbels was both Gauleiter (Nazi district leader) of Berlin and head of the Reich Propaganda Ministry, and after the summer of 1940 Baldur von Schirach was made Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter (the equivalent of governor) of Vienna. In their capacities as the highest authorities in their respective territories, they were both encouraged to ratchet up this domestic competition—cultural politics under National Socialism were nothing if not hyperactive and competitive.²³ And because the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics had such a long history of brand labeling, they became especially effective competitive instruments.

Interest among contemporary music historians in the politicization of high musical culture under National Socialism is a comparatively recent development, with a significant increase in studies of specific subject areas. Of course, it is not the intention of this book to provide an encyclopedic overview of musical politics under National Socialism. The now fairly voluminous research literature will be referenced whenever discussions of the two orchestras require. However, the publications dealing with individual orchestras during the Nazi era can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand;²⁴ the number of publications that examine the history of the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics under National Socialism is correspondingly sparse. Pamela Potter’s essay about the Berlin Philharmonic was groundbreaking. Potter was the first scholar to examine in detail the history of the orchestra under National Socialism, in the process laying out the economic connections between them.²⁵ Henning G. Bleyl took up the issue of foreign concert tours,²⁶ while Misha Aster contributed a comprehensive monograph about the Berlin Philharmonic under National Socialism on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the orchestra in the fall of 2007.²⁷ Aster’s book provides a detailed, well-researched history of the orchestra which I found stimulating, even though I no longer always agree with his line of argument, which I will discuss critically where appropriate.

The amount of scholarly work on the Vienna Philharmonic under National Socialism was for many years rather modest. Oliver Rathkolb was the first to examine the connections between the orchestra and National Socialist cultural policies.²⁸ He was followed not long after by a member of the orchestra itself: the then-head of the Historical Archive of the Vienna Philharmonic and the orchestra’s chairman until September 2014, Clemens Hellsberg, dealt with the history of the orchestra under National Socialism in a chapter in his historical overview of the Vienna Philharmonic, which was published in 1992 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Philharmonic concerts.²⁹ More than a decade later, young historians, among them my colleague Bernadette Mayrhofer and me, began to reexamine aspects of the orchestra’s response to the National Socialists³⁰—and especially to the expulsion and emigration of members of the Vienna Philharmonic.³¹

Since then, the implications of our work have again become explosive. Questions began to be voiced about how access to the Historical Archive of the Vienna Philharmonic (henceforth abbreviated HAWPh) was being impeded. As late as 2003, Hellsberg, in his capacities as chairman of the orchestra and head of the archive, denied my request to examine the archive’s holdings. The reason given was that the minutes mentioned many very personal problems of and with the individual members and all-too-human internal arguments and artistic differences, including with conductors, so their publication would most assuredly not be in the interest of our association.³² On the occasion of the exhibition titled 70 Jahre danach—Die Wiener Staatsoper und der ‘Anschluss’ 1938: Opfer, Täter, Zuschauer (70 Years Later—The Vienna State Opera and the Anschluss of 1938: Victims, Perpetrators, Bystanders),³³ this refusal erupted into heated debate,³⁴ because until recently all outside researchers attempting to delve into the recent history of the orchestra had been routinely denied access.³⁵ After my request to do research in the archive was denied in 2003 and 2004, and after many letters and meetings, by the time the debate erupted in 2008 I had come to an agreement with Hellsberg and Dieter Flury, the business manager of the Vienna Philharmonic, that I would be given (more or less) unlimited access to view and make use of the materials in the archive.³⁶ This was the first time that an outside researcher had gained access to archival material, which had previously been presented only in abridged and excerpted form in Hellsberg’s history of the orchestra. It may undoubtedly be viewed as an effect of our efforts to gain access to the archives and the resultant publications that after an intense political debate about its Nazi past, which began shortly before the 2013 New Year’s Eve concert, the orchestra decided to mount on its website the work done by an outside research group (consisting of me, Bernadette Mayrhofer, and Oliver Rathkolb as project director) as part of the history of the orchestra under National Socialism.³⁷ Since then Mayrhofer and I have completed an independent research project, a comprehensive study of the expulsion for racial or political reasons of members of the Vienna Philharmonic.³⁸ Published in 2014, the book contains detailed portraits of individuals forced into exile and discusses the postwar history of the orchestra, which was marked by anti-Semitic animus, with a focus on the debates around restitution, which have come to light as a result of recently discovered audiotapes of the proceedings of orchestra meetings. With this in mind, I incorporated a study of the composition of the leadership committee of the Vienna Philharmonic after 1945—discovering in the process that starting in the early 1950s, large numbers of former Nazi Party members had been reintegrated into the leadership.³⁹

Of special interest for the present book were the minutes of committee and general meetings, which permitted deeper insights into the operations of the Vienna Philharmonic;⁴⁰ they form the core of the sources about the Vienna orchestra, although they do have some gaps. For example, all of the minutes from the period between 1925 and 1933 are missing from the archive. After 1933, although the minutes of the plenary meetings are there, those of the committee meetings are missing. Only as of April 1938 are all meeting minutes present from both bodies. In addition to the minutes, the Vienna Philharmonic’s files of correspondence proved another important source, although in most cases they contained only incoming letters; there were no copies of outgoing mail.⁴¹

Because the orchestra continued to be organized as an association (Verein) during the Third Reich and was subject to much less direct interference from the political authorities than was the Berlin Philharmonic, which had been transformed into a state-owned company in January 1934, material about the Vienna Philharmonic is very sparse in the two state archives, the Austrian State Archive (Vienna) and the Federal Archive (Berlin). On the other hand, several sources were found in the files containing the association documents of the Vienna Philharmonic, which is accessible in the Vienna City and Province Archive.⁴²

I was confronted with a completely different situation in Berlin. For one thing, I had no problem gaining access to the Archive of the Berlin Philharmonic; it has regular business hours and is open to the public without restrictions.⁴³

However, the archive contains very little internal information about the inner workings of the orchestra. A minutes book kept by earlier chairmen of the orchestra (a few excerpts from which are archived in the form of copies), which would probably have yielded some useful information about how decisions were made, have disappeared, according to Jutta March, the former head of the Archive of the Berlin Philharmonic.⁴⁴

Still, the archive contains numerous sources that document interactions between the orchestra and official and political offices. These greatly enhanced the corpus of sources relating to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, which consists largely of files from the Federal Archives. In addition, I found a large variety of materials in the Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (henceforth referred to as GStA) and in the Berlin Municipal Archive documenting the years before 1933 and the early phase of the National Socialist state.⁴⁵

As a result, I had available to me extraordinarily diverse types of sources for both orchestras: in the case of the Vienna Philharmonic, the archives provided a primarily internal perspective on the orchestra; in the case of the Berlin Philharmonic, however, they mainly documented interactions between the orchestra and officials as well as the ministries. The differences in the types of sources available are not unproblematic when it comes to comparing the politicization of the two orchestras. Nonetheless, by adding source material from outside the Philharmonic archives (I have already mentioned the German Federal Archive and the Austrian State Archive), I was largely able to smooth over these problems. Still, comparative gaps were unavoidable, especially with regard to the economic development of the orchestras. Here, the ability to compare is very limited: whereas the incomes of the Berlin Philharmonic musicians were well documented, those of the Vienna Philharmonic musicians are more sparsely so, because the books were not archived beyond the legally mandated storage period.⁴⁶ Overall, however, because of the highly diverse corpus of sources, an empirically supported comparison of the politicization of the two orchestras is nonetheless possible despite the differences in the primary sources.

There is also the matter of a rather large gap in the research relating to the musical repertoire, in particular to what is required for a quantitative analysis of the concert programs—a gap that this book closes only partially. The repertoire study in the final chapter serves a purely descriptive purpose, not a statistical one, because the extraordinarily broad repertoire, especially that of the Berlin Philharmonic, would provide grist for a dissertation of its own, although methodology would have to be worked out and statistically valid methods sought. Unfortunately, very little effort has been expended to date on examining the repertoires of these two orchestras, as a result of which there are hardly any studies that might be of use in social and cultural historical research.

It should be noted, however, that such a study has been conducted of the Vienna Philharmonic.⁴⁷ Desmond Mark, following in the footsteps of John H. Mueller’s study of the repertoires of American orchestras,⁴⁸ created a list of selected composers whose works were performed by the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna Symphony, noting the presence of these composers in the programs of both orchestras over the longue durée (1842–1974). Borrowing from Mueller’s somewhat confusing notion of the life cycles of composers, Mark divided the composers into five-year periods and calculated the averages. The years 1935–40 and 1940–45 represented two such periods. Unfortunately, this division makes it impossible to detect the break that took place in 1938, rendering Mark’s study unusable for the purposes of this work.⁴⁹ And so I had no choice but to do the quantification myself using an electronic index that the Historical Archive of the Vienna Philharmonic placed at my disposal.

Although Peter Muck published a collection of programs of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra,⁵⁰ there has as yet been no study of the repertoire of this orchestra.⁵¹ In his book about the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra during the Nazi era, Misha Aster dedicated a detailed chapter to programming, without, however, having taken it upon himself to do the time-consuming work of quantification and analysis upon which an educated interpretation of programming and repertoire must be based.⁵² Nor can Aster make up for the lack of quantification by the numerous examples that he detailed in his chapter on repertoire. In addition, the deficiencies in his depiction of repertoire led Aster to make various, sometimes serious, errors.⁵³ On the other hand, it is clear that Aster had more than a little success in teasing apart the interactions between the orchestra administrators, conductors, and the RMVP with regard to programming.

I conclude my critical remarks on the state of the research with the hope that in the future some of the research gaps described here will be filled in order to facilitate historical and cultural research into music as it was performed and used during that time.

*

The comparative perspective of this book is an artifact of the subject matter itself. But the point here is not to relativize the political foundations upon which the two orchestras built, but to gain a better appreciation of the polarity that existed and developed between the two: the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic may be viewed as opposite poles in terms of the development of their concert programming and practices, and as one might expect from the marketing labels that they embodied, the programming of the former tended to be more traditionalist, while that of the latter more modernist and progressive. As a result, any analysis of the political functions of the two orchestras under National Socialism must deal implicitly with the state of the music business as it existed at the time. Although the present work is limited to uncovering and examining the political underpinnings of the practices of the two orchestras, it is not a comparative orchestra history but a contribution to the research on music as politics under National Socialism.

As such, this book is a contribution to a long-debated and extremely controversial issue, namely the relationship between National Socialism and modernity. For a long time, papers discussing these issues were limited primarily to modernization under National Socialism as such,⁵⁴ but starting in the early 1990s they began to focus more specifically on National Socialist cultural politics.⁵⁵ The gap between these positions could hardly have been greater, as a glance at two diametrically opposite perspectives demonstrates.

Thus, for example, at the beginning of the 1990s the social historian Michael Prinz approached National Socialist cultural politics almost apologetically.⁵⁶ According to him, although modernism had been to a certain extent decapitated and provincialized in the (German) arts of the 1930s, it had by no means been eliminated. Prinz, it should be noted, allied himself with the contemporary historian Rainer Zitelmann, who along with elements of the Right has argued for historicizing National Socialism.⁵⁷ Central elements of modernism, according to Prinz, had asserted themselves in literature, architecture, and industrial design, despite acidic critiques of ‘functionalist cultural Bolshevism.’ It was furthermore incorrect to construct a distinction between the official party line and supporters within society: the front line between völkisch ideologues and the promoters of modern functionalist art forms had passed straight through the center of the party: Nazis could be found on both sides of the issue. In addition, Prinz claimed that the culture scene of the 1930s and 1940s had been far from homogeneous.⁵⁸

In this study of the politics of music, it will be my purpose to reflect critically on these positions, which in the final analysis tend to trivialize National Socialist cultural politics. Along with the literary and cultural historian Georg Bollenbeck, I view National Socialist cultural politics as decidedly antimodernist, at least in terms of the Nazi attitude toward the contents of art.⁵⁹ The case for cultural homogenization advanced by Zitelmann can certainly be made. It can surely be argued that a certain amount of space was created there—as epitomized by the cultural policies put in place by Schirach in Vienna. However, as I will show, this space resulted from a combination of programmatic vagueness, anarchic jurisdictions, and flexible methods of rule, which were characteristic of National Socialism.⁶⁰ According to Bollenbeck’s Deutsche Kontroversen um die kulturelle Moderne 1880–1945 (German Controversies Surrounding Cultural Modernism, 1880–1945), the educated middle-class critics of cultural modernism had actually been Hitler’s prompters.⁶¹ In fact, National Socialism had been characterized by a reactionary modernity that fought against cultural modernism in the spirit of radical nationalism, while at the same time making use of the most modern media and methods of distraction, especially in mass culture. This reactionary modernity was no self-perpetuating conservative reflex, nor was it an intentional development project; rather, it was an ideologically grounded pragmatic method of rule that had unintended consequences. In this, Bollenbeck discerned a deepening of the gap between ‘high and mass arts’: as a result of the suppression of modern art by the Nazis, the traditionalists among the educated class were given to see a feigned normality in the art world. In the area of mass culture, on the other hand, under authoritarian conditions, the Nazis served the broad masses, whom they sought to entertain without challenging them with great art. But at the same time, National Socialism attempted to smooth over this gap: it blurred the distinctions between art and life, but not in the manner of the avant-garde, which had attempted to realize the aestheticization of everyday life through their art. Rather, the National Socialists subordinated their aestheticizing strategy to their drive for total power. They attempted to aestheticize all areas of life, and, the reality of terror notwithstanding, aestheticizing became one of the bulwarks of their political efforts.⁶² Overall, Bollenbeck’s description of the ways in which National Socialist cultural politics functioned provides a wide array of revealing points of reference, which I intend to expand on in my interpretation of the politics of music, specifically focusing on the orchestras in question.

While theoretical work on the relationship between National Socialism and modernism does not generally distinguish different forms of modernism by region, scholars have shown great interest in distinguishing between a Vienna and a Berlin modernism during the pre-Nazi period, and the literature on this aspect is copious. In the interest of a broadly based depiction of the different starting positions of the two orchestras, I will now briefly discuss the various attempts that have been made to distinguish between the two artistic modernisms.

Although the common bond between the two cities is as notorious as their differences, according to Gotthard Wunberg, he nonetheless emphasizes the differences in his discussions.⁶³ In Wunberg’s view, modernism surfaced in Berlin (he was mainly talking about literature and publishing) about ten years earlier than in Vienna: in 1882, the founding year of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In addition to the difference in timing, he also stressed the qualitative differences in terms of the ways in which tradition was treated. Berlin was concerned with theory, Vienna more with practice; Berlin favored criticism, revolution, fundamentals, and programs; Vienna was about poetry. Berlin, according to Wunberg, wanted to clarify critically its relation to tradition; Vienna, on the other hand, wanted to master it by integration.⁶⁴

According to Theodor Adorno, Viennese traditionalism carried a ferment of skepticism within itself that was the prerequisite for going beyond tradition.⁶⁵ For him, this substantial given was paired in the composer Arnold Schoenberg with the sense of not belonging completely to the tradition, of being undomesticated, and with skepticism being expressed toward tradition at the same time. This ferment of skepticism, a consequence of the Josephine Enlightenment, was completely characteristic of Viennese traditionalism: "In an individualistic petty bourgeoisie whose material aspirations had for generations been locked in conflict with its precarious living conditions, this skepticism was intensified to the point of permanent dissatisfaction—to the point which Germans call grousing (raunzen) and which has since become an integral part of the Viennese tradition."⁶⁶

Societal inequality, in other words, made artistic radicalism possible, and its most important exponent in music was Schoenberg. At the same time, this was a reason that modernism disappeared from Vienna: the new Viennese music had never been reconcilable with its own milieu, according to Adorno, which was why it had from the very beginning been driven to dwell beyond its place of origin. Rather than piously conserve its Austrian element, it consumed it as a living force. The more rigorously it developed in contradiction to the official music of Europe, the more European it became, and the less Viennese.⁶⁷

This trend not only affected music in Vienna but was a feature of cultural modernism as a whole. Thus, for example, using arguments somewhat different from those of Adorno, the literary scholar Sigrid Schmid-Bortenschlager found that although attempts had been made during the interwar years to nurture an avant-garde, Vienna remained a non-place for the radical international avant-garde of the 1920s.⁶⁸ She ascribed this in particular to the hetero-stereotypes (or Othering) of the representatives of the international avant-garde, who at the artistic level supposedly continued to trade in the old political opposition between progressive Berlin/Germany on the one hand and reactionary, obstinate Vienna/Habsburg on the other.⁶⁹ As a consequence, this hetero-stereotype also became an auto-stereotype (that is, a stereotype constructed by Austria itself). After the end of the Habsburg monarchy, Austria, according to Schmid-Bortenschlager, viewed itself as a remnant of its former imperial greatness, which had officially sought political union with Germany. This had caused a glaring we-weakness (Wir-Schwäche) and a lack of cultural self-appreciation in Austria, which since 1918–19 expressed itself in a tendency to glorify the monarchy and turn toward the provinces, along with its cultural manifestations.⁷⁰ The Viennese cultural scholars Roman Horak and Siegfried Mattl have also attested to the low status of cultural modernism during the interwar years in Vienna, especially because advertising that was aimed at tourists in the 1920s had steered Viennese cultural politics along the path of historicizing; conversely, however, with an eye toward the spread of popular culture, Horak and Mattl have stressed that the modernists had for their own reasons sought isolation from the world of commercial success.⁷¹

Just as the particular face of modernism was determined by social and political structures in Berlin and Vienna, so was the relationship of the two philharmonics to modernism and tradition, especially in terms of their repertoire and the types of performances they staged. It should not be especially surprising that the Vienna Philharmonic, founded as it was prior to the political upheavals of 1848, might cling to tradition more than would its counterpart in Berlin, which was founded just when modernism was all the rage in that city. As a result, the relationships of the two orchestras to artistic modernism, and to technical and social modernity as well, differed markedly from the outset.

This is why the present work begins in chapter 1 by asking questions about the extent to which these very different orchestras related to modernism (and modernity) in their concert performances at the end of the nineteenth century. There I also examine the effects of these differences on the first great phase of politicization during World War I.

Chapter 2 concerns the consequences of this initial phase of politicization and examines the political conditions in which both orchestras found themselves during the interwar Weimar Republic (1918–33) and the Austrian First Republic (1919–34)—both parliamentary republics that came to an end at about the same time, when totalitarian, fascist regimes came to power. The relationship between the orchestras and the state—and how this relationship developed—forms the core of this chapter.

Chapter 3 deals with the history of both orchestras during their transitions from republics to fascist regimes. Of particular interest are the differences in the orchestras’ respective politicization up to 1938. After 1933, National Socialism created the political milieu within which the Berlin Philharmonic developed and worked; what has come to be known as Austrofascism, the authoritarian regime of Engelbert Dollfuß and his successor, Kurt Schuschnigg, provided an analogous backdrop in Vienna. With this in mind, I examine the changes in the organizational structure of the Berlin Philharmonic that resulted from its takeover by Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda in January 1934, as well as the economic restructuring of the orchestra that Goebbels undertook. The chapter also looks at how the Vienna Philharmonic was politicized under Austrofascism—which in many respects led to an ideology different from that of National Socialism, and to different cultural and political practices. Chapter 4 examines the ways in which the annexation of Austria to Germany in March 1938, when Austria became National Socialist, had an effect on the activities of both orchestras. Among other things, the international rivalry between the two now became a competition between two major cities within the same country. I will also compare the degree of politicization of the members of the two orchestras and examine how they treated their Jewish colleagues.

How these changes in personnel, organizational, and structural policies affected the public reception of the two orchestras is the topic of chapter 5. It examines the orchestras’ media strategies, which mediated their reception by the public. A number of different types of texts, including screenplays of a movie about each of the orchestras, are analyzed and interpreted based on historically informed textual criticism.

In chapter 6 I examine the politicization of the two orchestras at the concrete level of their musical practices. I also discuss the connections between musical reproduction and political practice based on a study of the repertoire that consists of both the frequencies with which composers were played and the different types of concerts performed. This discussion is based exclusively on the concert programs, not on musical interpretation.

1

Innovation versus Tradition: The Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century

Given the modesty which we Austrians display far too much in all questions concerning our own fatherland, there is reason to fear, I must say, that we will experience another Sadowa, meaning that the Germans, with their trained methodical aim for effect, will anticipate us, just as they did in that campaign, when they introduced the needle gun and took us by surprise.

ROBERT MUSIL, The Man without Qualities

These six successive evenings were possibly the greatest musical imposition ever to have been inflicted on the Viennese public. Even if the members of the orchestra had each been virtuosos of the first rank and the conductors gods, who would have possessed