Conference Agenda

Germany’s National Socialist era continues to offer rich terrain for exploring the interplay between music and politics (Prieberg 1982, Levi 1994, and more broadly Buch et al. 2016). How is musical life shaped by the conditions of (fascist) dictatorship? To what degree is music—its composers, artists, and musicians—implicated in the support of the regime? Or even in efforts to resist it? In recent years, scholars have been increasingly attentive to the gray areas, exploring both the limits to state efforts to politicize music as well as the continuities, in the case of Nazi Germany, in the patterns of musical life before and after 1933 (Potter 2016, Fay 2020). Drawing on a wide range of sources—archival material, newspapers, production designs, and performance data—this paper examines the fate of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal between 1933 and September 1939. In many respects, 1933 does not represent a major rupture in its performance history. It continued to be programmed at roughly the same number of theaters and for the same number of performances each year. However, the fact that Adolf Hitler’s birthday fell in April permitted a certain politicization of the work: it was thus possible to program Parsifal on Hitler’s birthday (which became a national holiday in 1934) as part of the tradition to offer Parsifal during the Easter period. More critically, the Nazi era coincides with Winifred Wagner’s decision to retire the original 1881 production of Parsifal. The heated debates that ensued renewed questions about the opera as Werk, notably the Bayreuth festival’s claims to be the sole source of authentic performances of the “Bühnenweihfestspiel.” Although Adolf Hitler himself intervened to secure the premiere of Alfred Roller’s new production in 1934, he refused all entreaties to re-establish Bayreuth’s monopoly over Parsifal. More critically, that production failed to establish a new standard, especially in terms of stage design. Not only did Bayreuth have to revisit the production in 1937, but other cities (e.g. Mannheim, Dortmund, Hamburg, Wiesbaden, Königsberg) also grappled with the challenge of mounting new productions that were both faithful to “tradition” and in accord with Nazi aesthetics.

The musical revue Wir machen Musik appeared on German screens in late 1942, at a time when debates were raging at the highest levels over the position of Unterhaltungsmusik within the Third Reich (Goebbels 1942, Brüninghaus 2010). While scholars have pointed out the film’s exceptional reliance upon contemporary jazz stylings (Krüger 1989, Witt-Stahl 2004, Wiemers 2017), they have yet to discuss the significance assigned to women as performers and—ultimately—the music’s racialized roots that party ideologues had defamed just four years earlier in the Entartete Musik exhibition (Heister 2014, Samama 2021). Moreover, commentators have failed to recognize how the film’s musical empowerment of female characters—through lead Ilse Werner’s commanding whistling and the performance of the all-women ensemble Die Spatzen—came at the expense of the classically-oriented male lead.

This paper explores how the German propaganda ministry could have allowed the release of a film that appears to subvert Nazi cultural and ideological policies through jazz-inspired musical numbers and a leading female role that emasculated and debilitated the protagonist. Independent-minded director Helmut Käutner was able to exploit the relaxed moment in censorship to release Wir machen Musik (Jockwer 2008), which portrayed the 21-year-old Werner as “Swingjugend” Anni, who wielded the powers of rhythm (syncopated singing and tap dancing) and sound (whistling) over her discouraged and depressed composer-husband Paul. Moreover, the closing revue number “Notenparade” clearly draws upon Hollywood models from the 1930s through its gender ambiguity, glamorous mise-en-scène, and jazz styling (Jochwer 2006).

Unpublished and published documents from the Bundesarchiv (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda and its Reichsfilmintendanz) and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Sammlung Filmwerke) help to establish the fraught ideological landscape surrounding Wir machen Musik as well as its precarious status within the censorship apparatus. At the same time, reviews from the contemporary German-language press (Götzfried 1942, Jerosch 1942) and Käutner’s own undated reminiscences (de Agostini 2006) transmit the film’s favorable response among critics and audiences of the time. In the final analysis, the film helps undermine persistent notions of a consistent cultural policy within the Third Reich while providing insights into the subversive audiovisual practices that played out on Hitler’s screens.

The profound impact of the Nazi regime on cultural production, including in opera and musical theatre programming, remains a critical area of study within the field of humanities. In response, this paper presents the early version of a digital discovery tool developed to investigate the effects of political pressure on the programming of staged performances with music: opera, operetta, and incidental music for plays.

The comprehensive dataset is compiled from the monthly listings of the Deutsche Bühnenspielplan, spanning the tail end of the Weimar Republic to the brink of World War II. It encompasses performance data from 1928 through 1944 from theatres in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as German-language theatres in neighboring countries.

The dataset incorporates more than half a million performances and integrates multiple dimensions including work details, theatre characteristics, performance frequency, and the identities of the theatres’ decision-makers, the theatre director or intendant. The notable parameter in the dataset is the coding for individuals and works suppressed by the Nazi regime, derived by authoritative sources like the Encyclopedia of Persecuted Musicians (Maurer-Zenck et al.) and the notorious Nazi publication Lexicon der Juden in der Musik (Gerigk and Stengel 1940).

The project’s ambition extends beyond generating performance statistics; it aims to bolster the accessibility and interoperability of cultural heritage data by integrating the dataset with existing networks of Open Linked Data. This integration is facilitated by the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) initiative at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

Sitting at the intersection of musicology with theater studies and the digital humanities, this endeavour promises to deepen our understanding of the progressive repertoire of the Weimar Republic as well as the mechanisms of political pressures and censorship during the Nazi period.

By democratizing access to this rich repository of theater programming data, the project, once completed, invites a diverse array of inquiries and interpretations, shedding light on the intricate mechanisms of political pressure and censorship in cultural production.