A music historian uncovers Nazi Germany’s use of Mozart as a WWII propaganda tool in this “intriguing study [that] comprehends a range of vital topics” (Choice). As the Nazi war machine expanded its bloody ambitions across Europe, the Third Reich sought to promote a sophisticated and even humanitarian image of German culture through the tireless promotion of Mozart’s music. In this revelatory book, Erik Levi draws on World War II era articles, diaries, speeches, and other archival materials to provide a new understanding of how the Nazis shamelessly manipulated Mozart for their own political advantage. Mozart and the Nazis also explores the continued Jewish veneration of the composer during this period while also highlighting some of the disturbing legacies that resulted from the Nazi appropriation of his work. Enhanced by rare contemporary illustrations, Mozart and the Nazis is a fascinating addition to the study of music history, World War II propaganda, and twentieth century politics.
A young journalist goes to Venice, Italy, to interview a famous violinist, who tells the story of his parents' incarceration by the Nazis, and explains why they can no longer listen to the music of Mozart.
In this authoritative study, one of the first to appear in English, Erik Levi explores the ambiguous relationship between music and politics during one of the darkest periods of recent cultural history. Utilising material drawn from contemporary documents, journals and newspapers, he traces the evolution of reactionary musical attitudes which were exploited by the Nazis in the final years of the Weimar Republic, chronicles the mechanisms that were established after 1933 to regiment musical life throughout Germany and the occupied territories, and examines the degree to which the climate of xenophobia, racism and anti-modernism affected the dissemination of music either in the opera house and concert hall, or on the radio and in the media.
Raphaël Jerusalmy's debut novel takes the form of the journal of Otto J. Steiner, a former music critic of Jewish descent suffering from tuberculosis in a Salzburg sanatorium in 1939. Drained by his illness and isolated in the gloomy sanatorium, Steiner finds solace only in music. He is horrified to learn that the Nazis' are transforming a Mozart festival into a fascist event. Steiner feels helpless at first, but an invitation from a friend presents him with an opportunity to fight back. Under the guise of organizing a concert for Nazi officials, Steiner formulates a plan to save Mozart that could dramatically change the course of the war.
Inhumanities is an unprecedented account of the ways Nazi Germany manipulated and mobilized European literature, philosophy, painting, sculpture and music in support of its ideological ends. David B. Dennis shows how, based on belief that the Third Reich represented the culmination of Western civilization, culture became a key propaganda tool in the regime's program of national renewal and its campaign against political, national and racial enemies. Focusing on the daily output of the Völkischer Beobachter, the party's official organ and the most widely circulating German newspaper of the day, he reveals how activists twisted history, biography and aesthetics to fit Nazism's authoritarian, militaristic and anti-Semitic world views. Ranging from National Socialist coverage of Germans such as Luther, Dürer, Goethe, Beethoven, Wagner and Nietzsche to 'great men of the Nordic West' such as Socrates, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Dennis reveals the true extent of the regime's ambitious attempt to reshape the 'German mind'.
This is a reader s guide to Mann s classic novel that attempts to answer the most compelling question of the 20th century how could millions of Jewish men, women and children have been murdered by the government of a country that prided itself as the civilized land of music, the land of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven? The noble purposes of this novel are to understand the nature and sources of Nazi evil and to help ban it from the ring in the future. As you will note, Mann s explanation is relevant for events in Iraq in 2007. Mann gives a new answer to this question the land of music produced not only the freedom-based music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. It also produced twelve-tone row music, serial music composed without freedom but with strict controls. Founded on repetition, this new and ultra-control German music arrived with the advent of the Nazis. Actually invented by the German Arnold Schoenberg, in the novel it is invented by a fictional composer Adrian Leverkuhn. Mann believed that this kind of music contains the key to what happened politically in Germany starting at that same time. The first composition using the serial method was published in 1921, the same year Hitler became head of the National Socialist party. The key is that the music is composed with a rigid set of rules that must be slavishly followed. Based in repetition, these rules were to govern all aspects of music melodic progression, chord structure, rhythm. The rules denied composer freedom. This kind of music is discussed against the philosophical implications of the music of various composers such as Bach and Beethoven. Mann presents the view that Beethoven s late period music paved the way to Leverkuhn s serial music, to Gestapo music. Mann finds a demonic energy field at the heart of both serial music and of Nazism. Both triggered the rise of a demonic force by reason of blind and slavish obedience to rigid rules designed to establish control over too much, control over so much that freedom-denying methods were necessary to try to hold the result together. But Mann means something radically different by a demonic energy field. This is not your father s devil and this devil does not wear Prada. Mann s demonic is real and intangible but not a supernatural force. It is triggered by humans trying to control too much, even if the control is ostensibly designed for a good purpose. It happens when the end justifies the means. Then the means can and often become anti-humanitarian. Does that sound familiar? In the demonic energy field and like Doctor Faustus before him, Leverkuhn receives genius level energy but is rendered impotent of love, the demonic destroying the freedom that is the foundation for love. Genius-powered Leverkuhn produces serial music of a dissonant, fragmented and irreconciled character. His music is presented as the inevitable product of his pride twisted soul, which also has the uncanny power to influence otherwise natural events toward evil. In order to indicate that the same demonic process was at work on the national level in the case of the Nazis, Leverkuhn is given many of the personal characteristics of Hilter, including syphilis, and Leverkuhn s biography is told in a brilliantly structured counterpoint against the last years of the Third Reich [from 1943 to 1945].
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is an abridged edition of Saul Friedländer's definitive Pulitzer Prize-winning two-volume history of the Holocaust: Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. The book's first part, dealing with the National Socialist campaign of oppression, restores the voices of Jews who were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality following the Nazi accession to power. Friedländer also provides the accounts of the persecutors themselves—and, perhaps most telling of all, the testimonies of ordinary German citizens who, in general, stood silent and unmoved by the increasing waves of segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, and violence. The second part covers the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews—an official program that depended upon the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, the passivity of the populations, and the willingness of the victims to submit in desperate hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. A monumental, multifaceted study now contained in a single volume, Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is an essential study of a dark and complex history.
A 2018 FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE “[Hitler in Los Angeles] is part thriller and all chiller, about how close the California Reich came to succeeding” (Los Angeles Times). No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. The Nazis plotted to kill the city's Jews and to sabotage the nation's military installations: Plans existed for murdering twenty-four prominent Hollywood figures, such as Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Louis B. Mayer; for driving through Boyle Heights and machine-gunning as many Jews as possible; and for blowing up defense installations and seizing munitions from National Guard armories along the Pacific Coast. U.S. law enforcement agencies were not paying close attention--preferring to monitor Reds rather than Nazis--and only attorney Leon Lewis and his daring ring of spies stood in the way. From 1933 until the end of World War II, Lewis, the man Nazis would come to call “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles,” ran a spy operation comprised of military veterans and their wives who infiltrated every Nazi and fascist group in Los Angeles. Often rising to leadership positions, they uncovered and foiled the Nazi's disturbing plans for death and destruction. Featuring a large cast of Nazis, undercover agents, and colorful supporting players, the Los Angeles Times bestselling Hitler in Los Angeles, by acclaimed historian Steven J. Ross, tells the story of Lewis's daring spy network in a time when hate groups had moved from the margins to the mainstream.
Winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award Named a Best Book of 2019 by BookPage During World War II, French villagers offered safe harbor to countless strangers—mostly children—as they fled for their lives. The same place offers refuge to migrants today. Why? In a remote pocket of Nazi-held France, ordinary people risked their lives to rescue many hundreds of strangers, mostly Jewish children. Was this a fluke of history, or something more? Anthropologist Maggie Paxson, certainties shaken by years of studying strife, arrives on the Plateau to explore this phenomenon: What are the traits that make a group choose selflessness? In this beautiful, wind-blown place, Paxson discovers a tradition of offering refuge that dates back centuries. But it is the story of a distant relative that provides the beacon for which she has been searching. Restless and idealistic, Daniel Trocmé had found a life of meaning and purpose—or it found him—sheltering a group of children on the Plateau, until the Holocaust came for him, too. Paxson's journey into past and present turns up new answers, new questions, and a renewed faith in the possibilities for us all, in an age when global conflict has set millions adrift. Riveting, multilayered, and intensely personal, The Plateau is a deeply inspiring journey into the central conundrum of our time.
