Nazi Counterpoint: Bach and Mendelssohn

In 1829, seventy-nine years after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, a young Jew presented the composer’s St Matthew Passion at the Berlin Choral Society. It was the first time the work had been performed since Bach’s death; in fact, by that time, Bach’s music had all but faded into obscurity.

Ironically, a century later, Bach would be upheld as “der Deutscheste der Deutschen”—the most German of all Germans—while his champion, Felix Mendelssohn, would be branded a “dangerous accident of music history” and his “degenerate” works expunged from the repertoire.

As a Nazi imperative, the elimination of all things Jewish needs no explanation; Bach’s elevation at Mendelssohn’s expense occurred in an era when alleged German racial superiority demanded cultural and musical “purity”. As an exercise in spin, however, there are lessons that resonate uncomfortably in today’s political climate in Australia, where freedom of speech and expression are under threat.

For some, the emergence of Nazi influence was a timely awakening of nationalist, conservative values; for others, it offered a deadly conversion to racial cleansing. And, as I discovered at the Bach House in the composer’s birthplace, Eisenach, nowhere was the insidious nature of the Nazis’ spin better demonstrated than in their control of music. I am most grateful to the Bach House’s Dr Jörg Hansen for his permission to provide the following evidence.

By the 1930s in Germany, sinister concepts were being propounded. Respected intellectuals and musicologists argued that forces existed in the inner life of sounds—forces such as history and the “mighty unity of Blut und Geist (Blood and Spirit) which turn men like Bach into embodiments of the higher values of their people and thus the highest values of human culture anywhere”.

In 1933, National Socialism became the state ideology. Its driving focus was the thesis of the superiority of the Aryan race; and how better to emphasise the supremacy of the race than through German culture? The question then became: What was German in music and culture, and what wasn’t?

Two decisive figures emerged to answer the question: Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, on the part of the government; and Alfred Rosenberg, chief Nazi ideologist, on behalf of the party.

Rosenberg had already established his Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Combat Group for German Culture) in 1928. His book Der Mythus (The Myth), an anti-Semitic, anti-Christian work, was probably the most influential Nazi publication alongside Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle). It sold in the millions. According to Rosenberg, the music of Bach and Beethoven signified the breakthrough of an unparalleled spiritual power, the “Germanic overcoming of the world”. (Later, Rosenberg was appointed Reichsminister for Occupied Eastern Areas; he was condemned to death at the Nuremberg Trials and executed.)

Goebbels, meanwhile, controlled the Reichs­kulturkammer (Imperial Chamber of Culture) whose specialised departments controlled literature, music, art, theatre, film, newspapers and radio. In 1933, he established the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK; Imperial Music Board) led by composer Richard Strauss and conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Any musician who wanted to pursue his career required the approval of the RMK.

Having identified Bach as the epitome of German musical prowess, the Nazis then needed to dominate one of Germany’s—and the world’s—oldest musical institutions. The first Bachgesellschaft (Bach Society), initiated by Mendelssohn, was officially established in 1850 by Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt among others. Its aim of publishing Bach’s works in their entirety for the first time was largely accomplished by 1900. In that year, the old society became the NBG—Neue Bachgesellschaft (New Bach Society), with a new mission to promote Bach’s work internationally. The NBG also owned the Bach House in Eisenach.

Enter conductor and music director Peter Raabe (1872–1945). When Richard Strauss resigned “for health reasons” from Goebbels’s Music Board in 1935, Raabe was appointed to replace him. Raabe was a fervent Nazi; in photographs he is almost a caricature of an Aryan intellectual: a harsh face with silver blond hair and eyes blazing with manic certainty. Raabe’s reputation as a conductor added substance to the Music Board; by anchoring Nazi doctrine in tradition, he helped make it socially acceptable. Under Raabe, the Board became an instrument of total control. Raabe banned thousands of Jewish musicians from practising their profession, prohibited performances of Jewish music, and banned Jews from attending concerts and dances. For Raabe, German culture was in a struggle to survive, pitted against “rubbish and kitsch” (read Mendelssohn). To all intents and purposes, Raabe became the executor of racial cleansing in music. He also became the senior National Socialist member of the august New Bach Society. As a result, its distinguished Jewish members were persecuted and driven from their positions.

Bach was swiftly co-opted by Nazi propagandists. Racial theorists and Nazi musicologists hailed Bach’s music as “being purely Nordic”, “the highest embodiment of Nordic musical art”, and his polyphony desirable for “the region inhabited by the blond race”. In a time of foreign domination over German music, Bach signified a “revitalising supply of blood from the roots”. One of Rosenberg’s German culture combat group members, Friedrich Blume (1893–1975), argued that in the consolidated power of Bach’s music, the forces of the past came together. In his book Das Rasseproblem in der Musik (The Problem of Race in Music), Blume was in awe of Bach’s B Minor Mass, wherein he said, “the mighty discharge of the Nordic spirit and Nordic life force grips us with racial momentum”.

Nazi propagandists concerned with the science of genetics developed a slide show to inform school pupils of how the principles of heredity required selective mating. Entitled Blut und Boden—Blood and Soil—the series used the Bach family tree to demonstrate how a desired characteristic such as musical ability is passed on to children by parents who share the appropriate genes. Bach came from solid Thuringian farming stock that boasted a rich thread of musical talent. Thus, Johann Sebastian Bach was the result of successful inbreeding.

In Rasse und Stil (Race and Style), the Nazis’ leading racial theorist Hans F.K. Günther (1891–1968) extolled Bach’s music as the “most powerful example of Nordic creation”. He wrote:

The great works of Nordic art share a vehement desire to burst forth into new realms, curbed by a cool rigour: the Nordic restraint. Is not Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor a good example of this?

Never mind that Bach did not possess blue eyes and blond hair; “Bach may have had non-Nordic features physically,” conceded Günther, “but as an artist, he is purely Nordic.” (Günther continued writing about racial theory and eugenics, and denied the Holocaust, until his death.)

Similarly, music teacher and journalist Curt Rücker (1904–55), a member of Goebbels’s music board, passionately proclaimed that Bach had sprung “from the miracle-blessed German soil” and was “immovably bound to it”. In his 1935 book Johann Sebastian Bach der Deutsche (Johann Sebastian Bach the German), he elaborated how Bach

had emerged from the blood of farmers, town musicians and organists … the blood sanctity of the lineage was thus preserved, to reach ultimately, in Johann Sebastian’s creations, an unforgettably sublime crowning of German intellectual and spiritual strength … Today, when, after years of bitterest pain before the illusion that those foreign to our species have unscrupulously held before us, we have been led back to the sanctity of what binds us in blood and spirit … We recognise in Bach’s life too his roots to his homeland as that which conditions everything.

Ernst Bücken, Professor of Musicology in Cologne, agreed. In his 1940 publication Musik aus Deutscher Art (Music from the German Nature), he proclaimed that Bach’s music was like “an intellectual flow removed from all temporality, in which we perceive the sounds of our German blood flowing”. Bach, he declared, was the embodiment of German musicality and “stands before the spirit of the nation”.

Richard Eichenauer (1893–1956), author of Musik und Rasse (Music and Race, 1937), developed theories on the “musical racial soul”. Eichenauer, a music teacher and official at the Central SS Racial and Settlement Office, wrote:

All observers of art who apply racial standards agree that Bach is simply the absolute embodiment of Nordic musical art … and if the question is put forward if our people can hope ever to be blessed again with great masters of music of our soul and kind, then, we are taught by the science of the races, the answer is not to be found in the arts, but in biology.

His book was republished in 1958.

The foremost Bach expert in the first half of the twentieth century was Arnold Schering (1877–1941), editor of the Bach Yearbook of the New Bach Society. Like Eichenauer, he believed that the German racial soul, in musical terms, was under threat from “a brutal-sensual music foreign to our race” that “threatened to alienate us from the insoluble cohesion of higher music and higher poetry”. He argued that German musical sensibilities possessed an innate feeling for polyphony.

The poet Wilhelm Schäfer (1868–1952), whose avidly Nazi work was highly regarded by Hitler, went further. In his speech to the New Bach Society in Bremen in 1934, Schäfer declared that Bach was “the keeper of the Grail in the rebirth of German culture and music”. He hailed the arrival of a new moment in history:

Now the world has changed, and music will have to change its world too; because the arrogance of thinking that art could have an independent life, within the concept of art for art’s sake, has passed by … In the new era now struggling so powerfully to be born, there will be no end to Johann Sebastian Bach.

Nazi propagandists appropriated Bach at every opportunity. When Hitler attended the Reichs-Bach-Fest Concert at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in June 1935, the program included the Brandenburg Concerto No. 1. The Leipzig newspaper reported,

The Führer followed the austere music of Bach seriously, in a characteristic pose, often slightly bowing forward, his hand on his knee. It is a music in harmony with his spirit—austere, disciplined to its core, and German through and through.

Of course, there was one considerable ideological complication. Bach had been a pious Christian. Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, was just over the hill from his family home. The most ardent Nazis reluctantly accepted that the composer’s spiritual works were “amongst the highest cultural assets of the German people”. And therein lay the conflict with party ideology. Rosenberg, for one, demanded that “the Church hymnals should be cleansed of the songs of Jehovah”. In the Christmas Oratorio, phrases such as “the Jewish land” became “the Father’s Land”, “Prince of David’s stem” became “Prince from noble blood”, and “Prepare thyself, Zion” amended to “Prepare thyself, my soul”. One of Bach’s preludes acquired new lyrics: “Hail to you, Hitler! Hail to your noble carriage, [you have] opened the gate of freedom …”

Eichenauer, too, called for drastic rewriting of texts in Bach’s work:

By no stretch of the imagination, however great the music, can we have people sing at our community festivals “Ye sons of Israel with intrepid heart” … We must be courageous in finding new arrangements … It is not at all true that the poetic visions in sound that are Bach’s cantatas are indissolubly linked with stories from the Bible.

But what of Bach the man? What did he believe?

Nazi racial theorists trawled for evidence of the composer’s anti-Semitism. They seized on the fact that Bach’s estate contained a list of books in his library. Of Bach’s fifty-two theological books, two were anti-Semitic, written by the Hamburg pastor Johannes Müller. One of them, published in 1644, provided Christians with a foundation for resisting Jews who were accused of taking up too much space in Germany, even in those times. However, only one of Bach’s theological books has actually survived to date—his Bible—so whether the composer put much stock in Müller’s theories is inconclusive. Serendipity was not to be.

While Bach was being resurrected, Mendelssohn was being crucified. If Bach’s music embodied the German soul, Mendelssohn’s subverted it.

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–47) was born in Hamburg and raised in Berlin, the son of two important Jewish families. To avoid persecution, his parents had their children baptised as Protestants, converted to Christianity themselves, and used the name “Bartholdy” to distinguish themselves from the Jewish branch of the family. Young Felix’s assimilation was complete. The great Goethe was a fatherly friend, dedicating verses of Faust to him, while Mendelssohn set some of Goethe’s poems to music. On March 11, 1829, after overcoming serious opposition, Mendelssohn presented the St Matthew Passion for the first time since Bach’s death. The venue was the Berlin Singakademie (Choral Society) before the King of Prussia and his court, the poet Heinrich Heine, and other distinguished guests. The concert hall was so full that a thousand Berliners were turned away, and a second performance given ten days later.

Mendelssohn, one of the most popular composers of the German Romantic era, fell foul of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Any person is a Jew, the law declared, who has at least three Jewish grandparents. Mendelssohn had four. No matter that his parents had converted, that he himself had been christened and was a member of the Protestant church all his life; he was condemned under the law.

Persecution of Jews—especially those involved in music—gained traction and authority under the aegis of Richard Wagner (1813–83). Wagner’s condemnation of Jews in music was holy writ. Wagner’s essay Das Judentum in der Musik (Jewry in Music) was published in 1850 by the same Leipzig publishing house that produced the first complete edition of Bach. Wagner’s anti-Semitic diatribe was aimed squarely at Mendelssohn:

He [Mendelssohn] has shown us that a Jew may have an abundance of specific talents, the most refined and diverse education, the most august and delicate sense of honour, and yet even with the help of all these advantages not be able to create in us, not once, the deep impressions that touch our hearts and souls, which we expect from Art … Because there is one thing of which I am certain: Just as the influence that the Jews have gained over our intellectual lives, as manifested in the deviation and adulteration of our highest cultural tendencies, is not a simple, perhaps physiological chance, so it must also be acknowledged that it is undeniable and decisive.

In 1940, the musicologist Otto Schumann (1897–1981) delivered an exhaustive rationale against Mendelssohn in his Geschichte der Deutschen Musik (History of German Music). He argued:

One thing the Jews all had in common: their pursuit of a controlling influence over the German people. This is made easier for them by the astounding ability of the Jew … to adapt himself pliably and quickly to the particular disposition of the people among whom he lives … This explains the mere complaisance of Mendelssohn’s music, its floating sleekness and lack of deep roots … While others suffered and wrestled with their art, he sedately wrote his “pretty music” and, since his taste was undeniably refined, he managed to create works with a smooth, polished exterior that gained him, undeservedly, the reputation of a German master. The Reich does not dictate whether one must write tonal or atonal music, polyphonic or homophonic music, or whether one must write operas or marching music. It simply prepares the soil from which German musical art can grow. However, there is no place for weeds in this soil; these must be eradicated, whatever type they be. Hence the ruthless consistency with which everything Jewish and Jew-related has been banned from German musical life since 1933 … Only that which corresponds to, or is related to, the racial constancy of the German people may lay claim to a right to life in Germany.

Otto Schumann’s thoughts were echoed by a growing number of racially motivated musicologists. The central themes were that Mendelssohn never had to struggle or suffer, his music possessed a “smooth easiness” and “too much that was unreal and sentimental”, and “utterly failed to speak in the great German language of feeling and form”. The evidence was incontrovertible, they said; Mendelssohn the Jew had secretly set out to subvert the German spirit. Given the state’s anti-Jewish and anti-Christian proclivities, one can only imagine that his mighty symphony, the Reformation, must have been a red rag to the Nazi bull!

Another musicologist, Erich Valentin (1906–93), was the author of a popular Mozart biography, republished as recently as 2006. However, in 1941, Valentin was more concerned with how Jewry had gained access to a world in which it did not belong:

The sceptre of music was seized by one who, like all of his blood who appeared on the scene after him, was spared the fighting spirit: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the banker’s son, on whom fame, happiness, success and power were showered. Everything, everything was granted to him, even the credit for re-awakening Johann Sebastian Bach … This is how it started. This is how it continued. The stranger [the Jew], with Satanic eagerness, displaced the owner from the land and home of his fathers.

Valentin wasn’t the only one who rewrote history. Karl Blessinger (1888–1962), a professor at the Munich College of Music, similarly denied Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach. In Judentum und Musik (Judaism and Music), Blessinger argued that Bach had once again become our own, “but not because of—rather in spite of—any historical connection Mendelssohn may have had to his revival”. As far as Blessinger was concerned,

music plays a highly significant role in the Jewish attack on all areas of our culture and our way of life … The young Mendelssohn was able within a short time not only to secure a leading position in the realm of German music, but also move the German bourgeoisie to an uncontradicted inner acceptance of Mendelssohn.

“We have the duty to eliminate Jewry from music completely,” declared another musicologist, Hans Koeltzsch (1901–89), in his Das Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music) in 1935:

The European art of music is of the Nordic spirit … Gothic polyphony, Bach’s fugue, Gluck’s operas, are the looming monuments to the unfailing creative power of the Nordic musical spirit in it … The naïve question as to whether German musical life loses anything when Jews are no longer a part of it, can be happily negated by even the most sceptical of critics … This is why in the broad realm of German music there can be no middle ground any more, no tolerance or understanding, no humanity …

Koeltzsch attached to his essay a list of Jews working in music, among them forty-four composers, forty-three operetta composers and librettists, thirty-nine conductors, forty-one singers, twenty-seven violinists including Yehudi Menuhin, and twenty-six pianists including Wanda Landowska and Rudolf Serkin.

Hans Brückner (1897–1941) and Christa Maria Rock (1896–1970) published an “ABC of Jews in Music” in 1938, listing some 5000 musicians, many erroneously. The authors’ research was so flawed that even the Nazi authorities distanced themselves from the book. However, many music officials took it as gospel. (After the war, Rock passed herself off as a persecuted Jew and emigrated to the United States. She died in New York, never having been called to account for her wartime activities.)

The official Lexikon der Juden in der Musik (Encyclopaedia of Jews in Music), published by the Imperial Music Board, listed 15,000 verified Jewish entries. Its authors, the musicologists Theo Stengel (1905–95) and Herbert Gerigk (1905–96), were aided by SS member Wolfgang Boetticher (1914–2002), who lectured at Oxford and Cambridge after the war. As the Holocaust swung into full operation, Rosenberg employed Boetticher and Gerigk in his Special Music Force. They criss-crossed occupied Europe, pilfering archives of music, and supervised the storage and removal of musical instruments confiscated from Jewish homes. By August 1943, three trains loaded with musical instruments left Paris every week bound for Berlin. A staggering 6000 upright and grand pianos, harpsichords and spinets were “taken to safety”.

Another cruel blow awaited Mendelssohn’s status. He had been Director of Music at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, where the orchestra rose in fame under his baton. His friends included the Schumanns, with Clara performing regularly at the concert house. (Today, the Gewandhaus Orchestra is arguably the equal of the Vienna and Berlin philharmonics.) A grateful city made him an honorary citizen. In 1892 the city honoured him posthumously by erecting a larger-than-life bronze statue outside the hall where he had conducted, “as a symbol of the gratitude which our city owes to him, whose name we mention in love and reverence”.

As Nazi propaganda increased, Mendelssohn’s memorial was deemed an “offence to the public”. It was removed in 1936. Immediately the mayor, Carl Goerdeler (1884–1945), resigned in protest, refusing to take responsibility for “an act of cultural barbarity”. (He later became head of the German resistance movement, and was executed after Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt on Hitler.) The London Philharmonic and conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, touring Germany at the time, were scheduled to perform at the Gewandhaus the day Mendelssohn’s statue disappeared; they played in their street clothes in protest. Mendelssohn’s monument has never been found; many believe it was melted down for the National Wagner Memorial.

Mendelssohn’s music was heard for the final time in the Third Reich at a 1944 orchestral concert in Auschwitz for the SS Guards. The camp’s orchestra, under the direction of Gustav Mahler’s niece—the famous Jewish violinist Alma Rosé, who perished at the camp later that year—performed Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64.

While the Nazis had a wide repertoire of German music from racially acceptable composers, one of Mendelssohn’s works was proving impossible to eradicate or replace: his music for Shakespeare’s Ein Sommernachtstraum (Midsummer Night’s Dream). The public and musicians resisted calls to scuttle it. In order to deal with this “emergency situation”, Rosenberg’s Nazi Sonderstab Musik (Special Music Force) instituted a competition to Aryanise Mendelssohn’s “moonlight with candy floss”. A dozen composers set to work; the winner ultimately was Carl Orff of Carmina Burana fame, who received 5000 Reichsmark. However, the work’s Third Reich premiere on September 10, 1944, was cancelled: after wartime bombing, all Leipzig theatres were closed for the duration. On that score at least, Mendelssohn had the last laugh.

Today, Mendelssohn’s apartment in Leipzig has been lovingly restored, its atmosphere palpable. There you can explore the room where the Mendelssohns and Schumanns conducted their musical soirees. Mendelssohn’s delicate paintings line the walls, and the trunk that went on his travels to Italy and Fingal’s Cave stands in the corner.

Nowadays in Germany, the forces within the actual inner life of sounds exist not for proving racial superiority but to provide the sanctity of pleasure.

Sadly though, not all the old Nazi spinmeisters have departed to Valhalla. Anti-Mendelssohn arguments are still advanced today—minus, of course, their overt anti-Semitism. For example, Otto Schumann’s books were still being printed into the 1980s, his arguments undiminished although specific references to Jewishness were omitted:

For decades new voices have always arisen, calling loudly for a campaign against the overestimation of Mendelssohn … Mendelssohn is the master of the merely “beautiful” form … this highly gifted, carefully trained musician who reached maturity early and lived in apparent wealth was, to a certain extent, the anticipated mirror of a bourgeoisie which enjoyed an unchallenged position of ownership, and which wanted to bedeck its life with glittering ornamentation was also willing to do something for the “inner being”, as long as it did not require too much spiritual effort. The days of such a carefully cultivated, superficial life are now gone … Mendelssohn’s creativity had never borne fruit, it was an abundance of blooms that soon wilted and left behind little more than a baleful fragrance.

Other Nazi musicologists remained active after the war too. Karl Blessinger remained in his university post from 1935 until emeritus status was conferred in 1951. Hans Koeltzsch served with North German Broadcasting, Hamburg. His New Opera Guide was popular and his dissertation on Schubert was last reprinted in 2002. With greater subtlety than he employed during the war, he continued to disparage Mendelssohn and other Jewish composers such as Meyerbeer.

Choirmaster Erhard Mauersberger (1903–82) had been an ardent Nazi member of the New Bach Society, active in both Rosenberg’s Combat Group for German Culture and the radically anti-Semitic German Christians. His chorale book was “purified of all Jewish influences”. In 1970, while Cantor of St Thomas’s in Leipzig, he removed the word Israel from the second verse “Israel rejoices” at a performance of the Bach Motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied. Old habits, it seems, die hard.

As Shakespeare wrote, “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill”. In the case of spin, whether crafted by the Nazis or other political entities to restrict our freedom of speech and expression, the dangerous seeds it plants grow to haunt (and condemn) us for years.