In the years after the Nazis came to power in January 1933 and throughout the Second World War, all aspects of life in Germany changed. Despite the social and political upheaval, gentile citizens continued to attend concerts. In The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany, historian Neil Gregor surveys how the musical worlds of German towns and cities were transformed during the Nazi era. Taking the perspective of the audience, rather than institutions or performers, Gregor delves into the cultural lives of ordinary Germans under conditions of dictatorship. Did the ways in which Germans heard music in the period change? Did a Nazi way of listening emerge?

Drawing on untapped archival sources, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany reveals that the true history was one of disruption but also near seamless adaptation. Through countless small acts, the symphony concert was reframed within the languages of strident nationalism, racism, and militarism to ensure its place inside the cultural cosmos of National Socialist Germany.

In this post, we speak with Neil Gregor about his research and his recommended listening to accompany the book. Listen to Gregor’s playlist here while you read on.

In The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany, you bring a new perspective to the history of Nazi Germany—specifically, how German citizens engaged with classical music concerts. Can you tell us more about this?

I’m obviously not the first person to write about classical music in Nazi Germany.  We have many excellent works about the musical politics of the regime, about particular orchestras, and about individual conductors or musicians too. I’ve been interested in thinking about things more from the perspective of the audiences, who are my main focus. In exploring whether a new way of listening to classical music emerged in Nazi Germany I am asking whether the concert hall is a site on which we can map the emergence of new forms of subjectivity.  Scholars in this field have long debated the extent to which ‘Germans’ became ‘Nazis’ and how. I want to suggest that the concert hall is a site on which these transformation processes can be mapped – but also one on which the remaking of the citizenry was actively pursued. 

It was pursued, I argue, via a massive effort involving the many different actors of local musical worlds – conductors, musicians, administrators, journalists, ordinary concertgoers, and so on.  Looking locally enables us to see that the world of classical music was not just forcibly remade by the Nazi regime imposing its will from above and outside. This has been an easy conceit behind which many in the musical world have hidden for too long.  Rather, looking at the local musical worlds of German provincial towns and cities shows how so many musical Germans swiftly, and willingly, embraced an offer to remake themselves.

What happened to Jewish musicians and concertgoers in this era?

This is one of the better-understood aspects of the period, insofar as there is a rich literature on individuals such as Otto Klemperer or Bruno Walter and their experiences of expulsion and exile. I think we are also familiar with the idea that less prominent Jewish musicians – those individuals who played fourth desk in the second violins in small-town theatre orchestras – were also driven out or murdered. But what has been really depressing about looking at individual orchestras’ files has been learning about the full extent to which this was driven by voluntary participation on the part of administrators on the ground, acting out of what is often described as anticipatory obedience i.e. fulfilling the regime’s wishes intuitively, before they were expressly announced. 

As far as Jewish audience members are concerned, even a space of imagined civility and politesse like the concert hall (again, we are quickly confronted with the deeply embedded conceits of the musical world) swiftly became a very intimidating environment for Jewish citizens. We just have to think about the act of moving from the foyer into the auditorium and the moment of ‘gatekeeping’ that it represents – ordinarily it is just a banal act of revenue protection, but under the circumstances of Nazi Germany it was a moment freighted with intimidation and possible humiliation. Unsurprisingly, many German Jews chose the path of circumspection and abandoned the space long before they were formally banned from attending.

While you were working on this project, what did you learn that surprised you the most?

I thought I was under no illusions, but the speed with which so many people in the musical milieu simply fell in behind the new regime in 1933 was breathtakingly depressing to behold.  And while I have never been instinctively drawn to the idea that music-making provided a space of retreat from the vicious politics of the regime for ordinary Germans, or that it somehow embodied ideals and practices of civility that were the antithesis of Nazi violence, I don’t think I was quite prepared to discover just how close Germany’s cultural institutions got to the genocide itself.  Perhaps the most extreme example of this is the fact that members of the Silesian State Theatre, based in Breslau (present-day Wrocław) traveled inside Auschwitz itself to entertain the SS men stationed there.  These were the actors, not the musicians, but they all worked under the same roof, and the point about witnessing and knowledge is clear enough.

How did you wind up in your field, and what do you love about it?

I think of my field as modern Germany understood in a broadly European context. Within that, I’ve always moved across sub-disciplines and topics in a way that might look a bit random at first sight. Essentially, each major book I’ve written has been an expression of dissatisfaction with the previous one. My first book was about the business history of Nazi Germany, which reflected the curiosities I had developed as an undergraduate. One or two critics rightly pointed out that in trying to explain corporate behaviors I had emphasized narrow business logics too much, to the exclusion of cultural factors. Rather than write another book about business that focused more extensively on corporate culture I decided to think through those cultural questions via a project on something different – that turned into a book on post-war Nuremberg and how the city dealt with the legacies of the Nazi era. Again, pleased as I was with the book, I was left with a nagging sense that in exploring commemorative practices such as the Day of National Mourning (the annual day for remembering the war dead) in the 1950s and 1960s I hadn’t really explored what such ritual events sounded like to their publics – including, of course, the music. And so here we are! 

What do I love about the field?  I’m not sure ‘love’ is the right word here, but at the risk of saying something deeply unoriginal, if you work on modern German history you do have a sense that it matters.  I don’t need to explain that to citizens of the United States right now. But the turn towards authoritarian nationalism is hardly a problem confined to the United States: the far Right is already in power across Europe too. It is impossible for someone like myself, attuned to those historical precedents, to observe what is unfolding right now without feeling alarm.  To bring this directly back around to my book, I think what I’m showing, among other things, is that the embrace of radical nationalist and racist politics is just as easily observable at the heart of polite, educated, affluent society as it is among outsiders to that social world.

You’ve created a playlist to accompany the book, which features performances of symphonies discussed in the book. Can you walk us through the recordings you’ve included, and why?

In the 1930s and 1940s, the recording of orchestral music was still very much in its infancy. Beyond the major orchestras of Berlin and Vienna few ensembles were making recordings as yet, and very little of what was recorded in the provinces survived that is good enough – in terms of playing standards or recording quality – to render it commercially viable to re-issue. Yet despite these caveats enough survives, and of sufficient quality, to provide at least a sense of the musical world that this book seeks to recover. The list includes overtures, concerto and symphony movements, reproducing something of the range of genres that a typical concert contained.  As well as recordings from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Berliner Staatskapelle the list includes early recordings of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and the Philharmonic State Orchestra of Hamburg. In addition to familiar figures such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, and Eugen Jochum, it features names that were well-known then but have now faded somewhat – Max Fiedler, Hermann Abendroth, Siegmund von Hausegger, or Oswald Kabasta.  

Three recordings of the first movement of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony provide insight into the range of conducting and performing styles prevalent at the time, which were more diverse than might be imagined (whilst also giving a sense of fluctuating playing standards even among the more prestigious orchestras). The repertoire featured here is not just German – the presence of Sibelius, Liszt and Grieg attests to a culture that was both Germanocentric and Eurocentric at the same time.  In this way and others, the book tries to capture something of a culture that was a little more open than is often assumed.

It would have been surprising indeed to find recordings of the specific concerts discussed in the book. But the recordings of Walter Gieseking playing Grieg’s Piano Concerto, of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Staatskapelle Berlin in Cherubini’s Anacréon Overture, or Siegmund von Hausegger and Oswald Kabasta conducting the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in performances of Bruckner symphonies – all of which do appear – provide, I hope, a starting point for imaginative immersion in the world I have sought to bring to life.

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Neil Gregor is professor of modern European history and director of the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich, How to Read Hitler, and Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past. Most recently he coedited Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor.

The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany is available now from our website. Use the code UCPNEW to take 30% off at checkout when you order from us.