provided invaluable editorial assistance for this volume, with Erik Levi helping to locate important documentation and Lloyd Moore reading and commenting on each chapter), Malcolm Miller, Gavin Plumley, Jutta Raab-Hansen and Peter Tregear. Additional thanks must also go to the historian Philipp Blom. In America, further support has come from the OREL Foundation, thanks to the conductor James Conlon and the Foundation's Director Robert Elias who also contributed invaluable editorial advice and guidance. Finally, Malcolm Gerratt from Yale University Press who provided the much needed impulse to put e-pen to e-paper and most of all, my editor Nigel Simeone, who helped sharpen the narrative and focus the arguments in each chapter. All of them, and many others too numerous to mention, have helped to made this book possible, and I am deeply grateful to every one of them.
Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
Introduction
This a magic cauldron be,
Wherein we find bewitching forces;
If you place your head inside
You'll witness all your future courses
A German future here to see
Within this fetid sink;
Yet don't be sickened by the scum,
Or its penetrating stink
With a smile, she bade me hither,
I quickly hid my fear
I hurried towards her, ever eager
To see what held this sphere
What I saw, I shall not say
To silence I am vowed
Indeed I hardly dare describe
The stench-enfolding cloud
With reluctance I recall
That dreadful, cursed smell
It seemed a mix of unwashed masses:
Ovens from a tannery in hell
Hideous the stench! Oh God help!
That still continued to rise
The fanning of dung it seemed to me
Of three-dozen fields in size.
Of Saint-Just's words, I know quite well
Once uttered on charitable boards
That sore afflictions, with rose-oil and musk
Won't work to cure the hoards
This rancid reek of a German future
Overwhelmed the senses
My nose had never inhaled the like
It shattered my defences.
Heinrich Heine, Germany: A Winter's Tale , from Caput 26, 1844
As this excerpt shows, German Jews had a complex relationship with their sense of national identity. Heine's epic poem from 1844, Germany: A Winter's Tale , offers a chilling prediction of the disastrous direction in which the German nation would move. In an apparent contradiction, Heine states in his introduction that his sense of patriotism consisted of dreaming of a world that one day would be entirely German. 1 Heine was simply personifying the conflict that resulted from his respect for German culture, above all its language, with his wariness about a national identity that saw itself as so exceptional as to be exclusive. As a Jew, he understood the notion of exclusion. At the same time, his response to German cultural exceptionalism was to reshape German culture through his own work: Heine was the poet for whom the Romantic German composers showed the greatest enthusiasm.
This book is about the Jewish composers who were banned by the Third Reich. Most of those directly affected were born within a decade of Heine's centenary in 1897. The mixture of exuberance and apprehension expressed by Heine had ripened by then into a sense of national entitlement. Jews were able to counter threats of exclusion from German culture by reacting as Heine, and reshaping it through their own creativity. Thus, by banning Jewish composers, Hitler's Reich amputated an essential limb from the body of German cultural continuity. Jews born within Germany or Austria had only recently been allowed to count themselves as full participants in their nations. In Austria, Jewish emancipation came about in 1867 with the creation of the new state of Austria-Hungary, while in Germany it started with the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871. Once Jews became active participants in what they viewed as the most cultivated and liberal society in Europe, they embraced all things German with a creative enthusiasm that came close to mania. As with Heine, years of
Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
Introduction
This a magic cauldron be,
Wherein we find bewitching forces;
If you place your head inside
You'll witness all your future courses
A German future here to see
Within this fetid sink;
Yet don't be sickened by the scum,
Or its penetrating stink
With a smile, she bade me hither,
I quickly hid my fear
I hurried towards her, ever eager
To see what held this sphere
What I saw, I shall not say
To silence I am vowed
Indeed I hardly dare describe
The stench-enfolding cloud
With reluctance I recall
That dreadful, cursed smell
It seemed a mix of unwashed masses:
Ovens from a tannery in hell
Hideous the stench! Oh God help!
That still continued to rise
The fanning of dung it seemed to me
Of three-dozen fields in size.
Of Saint-Just's words, I know quite well
Once uttered on charitable boards
That sore afflictions, with rose-oil and musk
Won't work to cure the hoards
This rancid reek of a German future
Overwhelmed the senses
My nose had never inhaled the like
It shattered my defences.
Heinrich Heine, Germany: A Winter's Tale , from Caput 26, 1844
As this excerpt shows, German Jews had a complex relationship with their sense of national identity. Heine's epic poem from 1844, Germany: A Winter's Tale , offers a chilling prediction of the disastrous direction in which the German nation would move. In an apparent contradiction, Heine states in his introduction that his sense of patriotism consisted of dreaming of a world that one day would be entirely German. 1 Heine was simply personifying the conflict that resulted from his respect for German culture, above all its language, with his wariness about a national identity that saw itself as so exceptional as to be exclusive. As a Jew, he understood the notion of exclusion. At the same time, his response to German cultural exceptionalism was to reshape German culture through his own work: Heine was the poet for whom the Romantic German composers showed the greatest enthusiasm.
This book is about the Jewish composers who were banned by the Third Reich. Most of those directly affected were born within a decade of Heine's centenary in 1897. The mixture of exuberance and apprehension expressed by Heine had ripened by then into a sense of national entitlement. Jews were able to counter threats of exclusion from German culture by reacting as Heine, and reshaping it through their own creativity. Thus, by banning Jewish composers, Hitler's Reich amputated an essential limb from the body of German cultural continuity. Jews born within Germany or Austria had only recently been allowed to count themselves as full participants in their nations. In Austria, Jewish emancipation came about in 1867 with the creation of the new state of Austria-Hungary, while in Germany it started with the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871. Once Jews became active participants in what they viewed as the most cultivated and liberal society in Europe, they embraced all things German with a creative enthusiasm that came close to mania. As with Heine, years of
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