German Exhibit Examines Relationship Between Classical Music And The Third Reich

The Third Reich is never an easy subject to cover, but at least the task is made somewhat passable by investigating the intricate relationship between classical music and the Nazis.

A new exhibit called Blood and Spirit: Bach, Mendelssohn and Their Music in the Third Reich, which runs through Nov. 8 at the Johann Sebastian Bach Museum in the east German town of Eisenach, focuses on classical composers Richard Wagner, Felix Mendelssohn and Johann Sebastian Bach, giants of the arts, whose works were sadly tied tightly into Nazi politics, idealism and anti-semitism.

Blood and Spirit attempts to comprehend and scrutinize the Nazi’s complex utilization of musicians and their work for political and social manipulation.

“We had a lot of positive reactions,” museum director Joerg Hansen told the AP.

“Most visitors are very surprised, because they didn’t know about Bach’s (music’s) role under the Nazis. They had no clue, for example, that he was played at Nazi party rallies.”

Hansen said that around 15,000 visitors, among them many foreign tourists, have seen the show since it opened in May.

Blood and Spirit essentially revisits how the Nazis rid the country of its Jewish musical legacy.

According to the AP report, visitors entering the show are ‘confronted with an irritating cacophony of the composer’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 interspersed with the staccato voice of chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels coming from a documentary playing in the gallery.’

“The Fuehrer followed the austere music of Bach seriously … It is a music in harmony with his spirit — austere, disciplined to its core, and German through and through,” a newspaper reported from the festival.

While they hailed Bach, the Nazis derided the composer Felix Mendelssohn because of his Jewish roots. Mendelssohn’s Nazi discrimination under the Nazis is examined in a second gallery; he was considered “unbearable for a cultural movement based on race,” according to one Nazi musicologist.

His romantic compositions “utterly failed to speak in the great German language of feeling and form” and “possessed too much that was unreal and sentimental,” Third Reich-era music critics quoted in the exhibit wrote.

The AP article points out that as part of the anti-Semitic push, a statue of the classical composer in the city of Leipzig vanished overnight in 1936. It proved more difficult to remove Mendelssohn’s music from the country, where it was extremely popular with the German public. There were no formal bans on his work, the Nazis hired several Nazi-friendly composers to rewrite and “Aryanize” some of Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with its famous Wedding March.

Today you will find many Jewish people who avoid Wagner’s music for a wedding ceremony, specifically the traditional and popular Wedding March; Wagner was notoriously anti-semitic.

In a Newsweek article, Michael Levitin writes that Mendelssohn’s reputation never fully recovered from the Nazis’ smear campaign.

Timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of his birth, the exhibit taps into a growing swell of Mendelssohn appreciation. Today his music is played regularly on German radio—which wasn’t the case 20 years ago—and the number of annual visitors to Leipzig’s Mendelssohn Museum has jumped from 5,000 to 30,000 over the past decade.

Said Hansen:

“Mendelssohn was the most celebrated Romantic composer of the first half of the 19th century. The only real answer to all this prejudice that persists in Germany is to perform his music and listen to it.”

levitin points out that the exhibit is enriched by its anecdotes of heroism. There is Leipzig Mayor Carl Goerdeler, ‘who failed to halt the removal of a monument to Mendelssohn in 1936 (the statue was finally reinstalled last year), later became a leading opposition figure executed in the Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler’ and ‘Alma Rose, the niece of Gustav Mahler, performed Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor just before she died at Auschwitz.