The emergence of a harder line in this domain was signaled by the appointment in 1936 of Adolf Ziegler as head of the Reichskammer fur die bildende Künste (Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts). Known for his startlingly realistic nudes, a specialty that won him the sobriquet Reichsschamhaarpinsler (official pubic hair painter of the Reich), Ziegler was an archconservative of the “blood and soil” school. Along with Goebbels, he organized the Third Reich’s infamous Ausstellung entartete Kunst (Exhibition of Degenerate Art), a display of 730 artworks that the Nazis considered representative of “un-German” aesthetic values. The collection, 282 which had been confiscated from galleries and museums around the country, included works by Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Georg Grosz, Max Beckmann, Ernst Barlach, Otto Dix, and Emil Nolde—to name just a few. The exhibition opened in Munich (Goebbels would have preferred Berlin) in July 1937 and attracted masses of viewers, many of whom undoubtedly wanted to pay their last respects to works that they were not likely to see again in the near future. When the show moved on to Berlin it prompted a similar response. At the time they opened their display of “degenerate” art, the Nazis also mounted the Great German Art Exhibition. As the name suggests, this show featured works that the regime considered emblematic of the best German traditions. The site was Munich’s House of German Art, which was the only new art museum to be built in the Third Reich. The fact that Munich, not Berlin, got this prize reflected Hitler’s determination that his favorite city should serve as the “Capital of German Art” during the Third Reich. This role can be seen as compensation for Munich’s loss of political clout, a process that continued in the Nazi era despite the Führer’s partiality toward his adopted hometown.
In the realm of music, if not in the visual arts, there could be no doubt that Berlin was the German “capital,” and its standards of artistic competence remained fairly high despite the departure of some leading figures. Recognizing the importance of music in the German tradition, the Nazis sought to exploit it for their own purposes. Peter Raabe, the second president of the Reichsmusikkammer, declared: “[Music is] to serve a social function, to be clearly defined in subordination to the general aims of National Socialism, and to be denied traditional autonomy.” Germans and Jews, it was further argued, could not produce similar musical compositions or even interpret music in the same fashion. As Goebbels proclaimed: “Jewry and German music are opposites; by their very nature they exist in gross contradistinction to each other.”
Although it proved difficult for Nazi theorists to define exactly how German and Jewish music differed, the regime subjected Jewish musicians to various forms of intimidation based on their supposed alienation from Aryan musical culture. Pressures imposed by the new regime induced four of Berlin’s most prominent Jewish musicians to emigrate from Germany in the first months of the Third Reich. Arnold Schonberg, whom the Nazis despised for his atonal music as well as for his race, left for Paris in May 1933 after being dismissed from his teacing position in Berlin. Kurt Weill also decamped for Paris in spring 1933, leaving behind a newly acquired Berlin house and his former wife, Lotte Lenya, whom he had just divorced. Otto Klemperer, who after his dismissal from the Kroll Opera in 1931 had been conducting at the State Opera, tried to stay in Berlin by proclaiming his “complete agreement with the course of events in Germany.” But the Nazis, Hitler in particular, hated him, leaving him little choice but to leave, first for Switzerland and then for America. His colleague Bruno Walter also hoped to stay on in Berlin, but upon learning that his services were no longer required at the Philharmonic he returned to his native Austria, where he remained until 1938. Like so many artist émigrés from Nazi Germany, these four musicians eventually found their way to Los Angeles. Both Walter and Weill prospered in their adopted home. According to Lotte Lenya, whom Weill remarried in exile, her husband avoided the émigré crowd because they were “always talking about the past, how marvelous it was back in Berlin.”
Not all of Berlin’s major Jewish musicians were forced to flee Germany in the early years of the Third Reich. Fearing that, as one Nazi functionary put it, “our artistic life might soon resemble a giant mortuary,” the regime eschewed a wholesale purge in this domain. Among the prominent musical artists who stayed, at least for a time, was Leo Blech, a conductor at the State Opera. Heinz Tietjen, the dra-maturg there, insisted that he could not get along without Blech. Moreover, the conductor enjoyed the protection of Hermann Göring, who was intent on retaining high standards in the Prussian cultural empire he oversaw. Blech was even allowed to conduct Wagner, earning a standing ovation for his interpretation of Die Gütter-dämmerung in June 1933. It was not until 1938, when the regime’s persecution of Jews became more systematic, that Blech was forced to leave Germany.
Blech was allowed to remain in Berlin because he was a so-called Günstlingsjude (favored Jew), but others managed to stay because the process for expelling them from the Reichsmusikkammer, which often precipitated emigration, was cumbersome and sometimes protracted. Musicians were found “unsuitable” for membership on the basis of questionnaires they had to fill out, which could take years. In the meantime, barring intervention from the authorities, they could continue to work.
In addition to bureaucratic inefficiency, the task of weeding out undesirables was deliberately hampered by the Reichsmusikkammer’s first president, Richard Strauss, who objected to the entire policy of excluding artists on the basis of race. Before judging Strauss a paragon of virtue, however, we should note that he accepted his post in the Nazi bureaucracy in order to further his own career; and that by serving the Nazis he helped provide them with much needed cultural legitimacy. During his brief tenure as president of the Reichsmusikkammer he seesawed back and forth between opportunism and efforts to do the right thing by his fellow musicians. He was forced to resign his post in 1935 after the Gestapo discovered that he had written his librettist Stefan Zweig to say that he had taken the Nazi post only to prevent worse things from happening. The deeper reason for his ouster was that his “weakness” on the Jewish question made him impossible as a Nazi cultural bureaucrat. Strauss was happy enough to step down, for he had grown weary of deferring to Goebbels on artistic questions, just as he had once hated toadying to the kaiser. “It is a sad moment,” he wrote, “when an artist of my stature has to ask some little upstart of a minister what I may compose and perform. I have joined the ranks of the domestic servants and bottlewashers and am almost envious of my persecuted Jewish friend Stefan Zweig.”
Another major musician whose qualified cooperation with the Nazi regime left an enduring stain on his reputation was Wilhelm Furtwängler, the brilliant musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic and the State Opera. Although, like Strauss, he was contemptuous of the Nazi authorities, he consented to become vice president of the Reichsmusikkammer and to stay at his posts in Berlin after Hitler came to power. His expressed reason for staying was to preserve the values of German culture in a perilous time, but he also knew that if he left he was unlikely to find such prestigious posts anywhere else in the world. To his credit, he used his prestige to protect a number of Jewish musicians in the Philharmonic, most notably the con-certmaster Simon Goldberg and the cellists Joseph Schuster and Gregor Piatigorsky. As the Nazis’ harassment of Jewish musicians grew, Furtwängler wrote a protest letter to Goebbels, who oversaw the Philharmonic, complaining about the regime’s anti-Semitic campaign as it applied to music. The grounds for his complaint, however, were pragmatic rather than ethical. “Quotas cannot be placed on music,” he wrote, “as they can be for bread and potatoes. If nothing worth hearing is given in concerts, the public will just stay away. For this reason, the quality of music is not merely a matter of ideology. It is a matter of survival.” He went on to argue that if the Nazis’ campaign against Jewry focused only on those artists who were “rootless and destructive,” and who sought to profit “through rubbish and empty virtuosity,” the fight would be “justified.” Furtwängler’s protest was hedged enough that Goebbels ordered it printed in the Vossische Zeitung on April 11, 1933. This allowed the minister to convey an illusion of openness without conceding too much ideological ground to a prominent artist who happened to be Hitler’s favorite conductor.