Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi GermanyWhen 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 s 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. |
Contents
On the Index The Third Reichs Prewar Campaign | 29 |
First Public Controls | 33 |
Raiding Jews and Jazz | 38 |
Broadcasting and Recordings | 46 |
Attempts at German Jazz | 52 |
Jazz Defiant The Reassertion of a Culture | 57 |
The Jazz Congregation and Its High Priests | 70 |
Jazz Within Politics | 90 |
The War Inside the Great Germanic Reich | 135 |
Hamburgs Different Drummers | 153 |
Near Defeat Jazz Toward the Final Victory September 1942 to May 1945 | 163 |
The Jazz Victims | 177 |
The Final Victory Postwar Jazz Triumphant | 201 |
Notes | 213 |
Primary Sources | 271 |
275 | |
Jazz Goes to War Compliance and Defiance September 1939 to August 1942 | 111 |
Jazz as Propaganda | 122 |
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American Musician April Artist August became Benny Goodman Berlin big band Blüthner Bohländer British broadcast Brocksieper club combo culture Daniels Danzi December Deutsche Podium Dietrich Schulz Django Reinhardt drummer Düsseldorf Emil Mangelsdorff February Feldpost film foreign Fox auf 78 Frankfurt Fritz Schulze German German jazz Gestapo Goebbels Goebbels's Haentzschel interview Hans Hinkel Heinz Helmut Zacharias Hinkel Hitler Youth Hohenberger Horst ibid January jazz jazz fans Jazz in Deutschland Jazz in Germany jazz musicians jazz records Jewish Jews Joost Joseph Goebbels July June Jung Klagemann Korseck Kreuder Kurt Lale Andersen Leipzig listen Mangelsdorff March Michaelis Mohaupt Müller Munich Musik Musikalische Feldpost Nazi November October orchestra Otto party performed pianist piano played players Polster propaganda quotation radio regime Reinhardt Rundfunk Scala Scheel Schulz-Köhn interview September stations Stauffer Stege Stenzel swing dance Tagebücher Teddy Third Reich trumpet Unterhaltungsmusik Wehrmacht Werner Zimmerle
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Page 3 - France in 1925, she found it dazzling: "The city had a jewel-like sparkle, especially at night, that didn't exist in Paris, The vast cafes reminded me of ocean liners powered by the rhythms of their orchestras, There was music...