They included the Ghetto Swingers, a Jewish jazz band that "toured" Auschwitz and Theresienstadt; the Luftwaffe pilot who listened to Glenn Miller while bombing London; the Berlin swing gangs and Zazous (Parisian jazz enthusiasts) who risked persecution and imprisonment for the opportunity to dance openly to prohibited swing records; Django Reinhardt, the brilliant guitarist who refused to flee Nazi-controlled France; and many others." "Swing Under the Nazis also explores Zwerin's confrontation with a past that still has claims on the present as he recalls his own encounters with contemporary oppression - most notably a concert tour through apartheid-controlled South Africa with his multiracial jazz group."--Jacket.
When the African-American dancer Josephine Baker visited Berlin in 1925, she found it dazzling. "The city had a jewel-like sparkle," she said, "the vast caf'es reminded me of ocean liners powered by the rhythms of their orchestras. There was music everywhere." Eager to look ahead after the crushing defeat of World War I, Weimar Germany embraced the modernism that swept through Europe and was crazy over jazz. But with the rise of National Socialism came censorship and proscription: an art form born on foreign soil and presided over by Negroes and Jews could have no place in the culture of a "master race." In Different Drummers, Michael Kater--a distinguished historian and himself a jazz musician--explores the underground history of jazz in Hitler's Germany. He offers a frightening and fascinating look at life and popular culture during the Third Reich, showing that for the Nazis, jazz was an especially threatening form of expression. Not only were its creators at the very bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy, but the very essence of jazz--spontaneity, improvisation, and, above all, individuality--represented a direct challenge to the repetitive, simple, uniform pulse of German march music and indeed everyday life. The fact that many of the most talented European jazz artists were Jewish only made the music more objectionable. In tracing the growth of what would become a bold and eloquent form of social protest, Kater mines a trove of previously untapped archival records and assembles interviews with surviving witnesses as he brings to life a little-known aspect of wartime Germany. He introduces us to groups such as the Weintraub Syncopators, Germany's best indigenous jazz band; the Harlem Club of Frankfurt, whose male members wore their hair long in defiance of Nazi conventions; and the Hamburg Swings--the most daring radicals of all--who openly challenged the Gestapo with a series of mass dance rallies. More than once these demonstrations turned violent, with the Swings and the Hitler Youth fighting it out in the streets. In the end we come to realize that jazz not only survived persecution, but became a powerful symbol of political disobedience--and even resistance--in wartime Germany. And as we witness the vacillations of the Nazi regime (while they worked toward its ultimate extinction, they used jazz for their own propaganda purposes), we see that the myth of Nazi social control was, to a large degree, just that--Hitler's dictatorship never became as pure and effective a form of totalitarianism as we are sometimes led to believe. With its vivid portraits of all the key figures, Different Drummers provides a unique glimpse of a counter-culture virtually unexamined until now. It is a provocative account that reminds us that, even in the face of the most unspeakable oppression, the human spirit endures.
The Nazis burned books and banned much modern art. However, few people know the fascinating story of German modern dance, which was the great exception. Modern expressive dance found favor with the regime and especially with the infamous Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda. How modern artists collaborated with Nazism reveals an important aspect of modernism, uncovers the bizarre bureaucracy which controlled culture and tells the histories of great figures who became enthusiastic Nazis and lied about it later. The book offers three perspectives: the dancer Lilian Karina writes her very vivid personal story of dancing in interwar Germany; the dance historian Marion Kant gives a systematic account of the interaction of modern dance and the totalitarian state, and a documentary appendix provides a glimpse into the twisted reality created by Nazi racism, pedantic bureaucrats and artistic ambition.
A ground-breaking study that gets us closer to solving the mystery of why so many Germans embraced the Nazi regime so enthusiastically and identified so closely with it.
Jazz was banned from German broadcasting as soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933. Yet throughout World War II, American jazz and swing were core components of the Third Reich's propaganda. Jazz classics such as W.C. Handy's famous St. Louis Blues, their lyrics neatly tampered with, came over the airwaves, alongside the famous Germany Calling programmes directed at Britain and allied forces around the world.
A New York Times bestseller, Norman Ohler's Blitzed is a "fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich” (Washington Post). The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to German soldiers. In fact, troops were encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to take rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to account for the breakneck invasion that sealed the fall of France in 1940, as well as other German military victories. Hitler himself became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—ultimately including Eukodal, a cousin of heroin—administered by his personal doctor. Thoroughly researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows. “Delightfully nuts.”—The New Yorker
"This significant contribution to German history pioneers a conceptually sophisticated approach to German-German relations. Poiger has much to say about the construction of both gender norms and masculine and feminine identities, and she has valuable insights into the role that notions of race played in defining and reformulating those identities and prescriptive behaviors in the German context. The book will become a 'must read' for German historians."—Heide Fehrenbach, author of Cinema in Democratizing Germany "Poiger breaks new ground in this history of the postwar Germanies. The book will serve as a model for all future studies of comparative German-German history."—Robert G. Moeller, author of Protecting Motherhood "Jazz, Rock, and Rebels exemplifies the exciting work currently emerging out of transnational analyses. [A] well-written and well-argued study."—Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans
During World War II, jazz embodied everything that was appealing about a democratic society as envisioned by the Western Allied powers. Labelled `degenerate' by Hitler's cultural apparatus, jazz was adopted by the Allies to win the hearts and minds of the German public. It was also used by the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, to deliver a message of Nazi cultural and military superiority. When Goebbels co-opted young German and foreign musicians into `Charlie and his Orchestra' and broadcast their anti-Allied lyrics across the English Channel, jazz took centre stage in the propaganda war that accompanied World War II on the ground. The Jazz War is based on the largely unheard oral testimony of the personalities behind the German and British wartime radio broadcasts, and chronicles the evolving relationship between jazz music and the Axis and Allied war e orts. Studdert shows how jazz both helped and hindered the Allied cause as Nazi soldiers secretly tuned in to British radio shows while London party-goers danced the night away in demimonde `bottle parties', leading them to be branded a `menace' in Parliament. This book will appeal to students of the history of jazz, broadcasting, cultural studies, and the history of World War II.
'INSIDE THE THIRD REICH is not only the most significant personal German account to come out of the war but the most revealing document on the Hitler phenomenon yet written. It takes the reader inside Nazi Germany on four different levels: Hitler's inner circle, National Socialism as a whole, the area of wartime production and the inner struggle of Albert Speer. The author does not try to make excuses, even by implication, and is unrelenting toward himself and his associates... Speer's full-length portrait of Hitler has unnerving reality. The Fuhrer emerges as neither an incompetent nor a carpet-gnawing madman but as an evil genius of warped conceits endowed with an ineffable personal magic' NEW YORK TIMES
This “extraordinary” memoir of a black man’s coming of age in Nazi Germany is “an entirely engaging story of accomplishment despite adversity.” —Washington Post Book World In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir—an astonishing true tale of growing up black in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Fuhrer’s spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door—or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi’s account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence. “A cry against racism, a survivor’s tale, a wartime adventure, a coming of age story, and a powerful tribute to a mother’s love.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune “An incredible tale . . . Exceptional.” —Chicago Sun Times “Destined to Witness examines a roller coaster of racism from different cultures and continents.” —The New York Times Book Review “Here is a story rarely lived and even more rarely told. We need this book for a balanced picture of the Holocaust.” —Maya Angelou “A nuanced, startling memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews “An engaging story of a young man’s journey through hate, self-enlightenment, intrigue and romance.” —Ebony
