German Beethoven Scholarship in the Nazi Period (1933–45)

GERMAN WRITINGS ABOUT BEETHOVEN between 1933 and 1945 directly reflect the nation's descent into the nightmare of the Nazi regime. From Hitler's rise to power until the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, his cultural ministers promoted Beethoven as a symbol of national prestige, and the state apparatus did all it could to manage and manipulate his public image. In keeping with party doctrines, his stature as a great German composer and a “Nordic hero” was publicized by the organs of party propaganda, and any aspect of his life and work that seemed to contradict the party line was forgotten or suppressed – such as the Flemish origins of his family. Even the Ninth Symphony, with its setting of Schiller's “Ode to Joy” and profession of faith in human brotherhood, was reinterpreted along party lines. Thus Hans Joachim Moser, an avowed Nazi sympathizer, could argue that Schiller's “kiss to the whole world” couldn't really mean “a desire to fraternize with every Tom, Dick, and Harry, …but must have meant a humanity conceived in as German terms as possible.” And recent scholarship has documented the ways in which the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, the primary German center of Beethoven scholarship, surrendered to the Nazi regime's demand that Beethoven be reincarnated as a true German hero, not as a believer in the rights of man and of human brotherhood, as in fact he was.

We need no reminder in the twenty-first century that in musicology and every branch of the arts and sciences, rampant German antisemitism of the early 1930s drove many Jewish musicians and intellectuals into exile, many of them coming to the United States if they were able to get there. And of course a vast number of German Jews were systematically deprived of all their rights and property and sent to their deaths in the extermination camps in what remains the most monstrous ideological crime in modern history.

Against this background, the story of critical and biographical commentaries on Beethoven may seem to be a lesser issue within the tortured history of German intellectual life under the Nazi regime.