The Opera Underneath

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-136
Author(s):  
Emily Richmond Pollock

Orff’s Oedipus der Tyrann recapitulated two cultural traditions simultaneously: first, the drive for opera to return to the imagined purity of ancient tragedy, and second, a German obsession with the Greeks. Setting Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles word for word in a declamatory vocal style with minimal, percussive accompaniment, Oedipus der Tyrann was estranged from opera and ascetic to the extent that some critics heard it as “an opera without music.” Orff eschewed intuition and operaticism, believing that a stripped-down approach would give him access to the universality of experience the classics had often represented for German culture. But the Germans’ Greeks were less apolitical and universal than Orff wanted to believe, and Orff inherited not only the elemental strengths of the “Greeks” but also the baggage of previous German appropriations of antiquity, from idealist philhellenism to the more recent nationalist reception of Greek culture during the Third Reich.

Author(s):  
Nicholas Attfield

The epilogue contributes to efforts to map continuities in musical thought between the Weimar and Nazi eras, and deals with issues of advocacy. There was not the straightforward rise to influence that is sometimes implied. Walter Abendroth had to overcome Pfitzner’s cantankerousness and fast-fading relevance. Heuss’s work was paraded by Fritz Stege in both the Zeitschrift für Musik and Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (‘Combat League for German Culture’). The Austrian musicologist Robert Haas encountered resistance against the project that, above all, symbolized his intended mediation of the Nazi party, the Austrian National Library, and the International Bruckner Society: the ‘complete edition’ of the composer’s scores. Gustav Wyneken transformed his image of Halm from the cosmopolitan socialist and impassioned music critic of the early 1920s and emphasized Halm’s place in the national pantheon of ignored symphonic composers. Halm became the latest composer-leader in a tradition of syntheses towards which his own work on the ‘third culture’ had pointed.


Author(s):  
Simona Forti

This chapter compares two opposing ways of conceiving the idea of the “Soul of Europe”. Both of them trace the origin of the idea to Greek philosophy and especially Plato. On the one hand, it is the Platonism adopted by the so-called 'Nazi philosophical anthropology' that interprets the Germany of the Third Reich, its Idea of Rassenseel, as the moment in which not only the debt of German culture to Greek culture is paid but in which Germany will finally be able to demonstrate that it is the only true heir of ancient Greece and that for this reason it must conquer the whole of Europe. On the other hand, as an example of an opposite vision, it is the work of Jan Patocka who is convinced that German philosophy can 'today' represent the soul of Europe, but for whom both the notion of soul and that of Europe are constitutively open and infinite, connected to the concept of a debt that can never be settled.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 263-275
Author(s):  
Jarosław Robert Kudelski

German cultural institutions had been conducting preparations to secure their collections in the event of a war since mid-1930s. The Prussian State Library, the holdings of which included the most precious German manuscripts and prints, was one of those institutions. Air attacks carried out on the capital of the Third Reich triggered the decision to evacuate the collection to Thüringen, Brandenburg, Pomerania and Lower Silesia. Largest deposits had been located in the latter. The unique heritage items stored there included medieval manuscripts, prayer books, music autographs and newspaper yearbooks as well as letters and private documents of many prominent representatives of German culture and art. Those items were evacuated, among other places, to Fürstenstein (Książ) Gießmannsdorf (Gościszów), Gröditzburg (Grodziec), Grüssau (Krzeszów), Fischbach (Karpniki) and Hirschberg (Jelenia Góra). The evacuation was conducted in cooperation with the heritage conservator for Lower Silesia, professor Günther Grundmann. With his assistance, in the course of a few years, a unique collection was created in Lower Silesia. Towards the end of the war the collection was deprived of proper care, as the authorities lacked resources to secure it. This resulted in the destruction of some items during military actions. The remaining parts of the collection had been taken over by Polish officials and were transferred to library collections in Krakow, Warszawa, Olsztyn, Toruń, Lublin and Łódź.


Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.


2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Brothers

The rise of neo-Nazism in the capital of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was not inspired by a desire to recreate Hitler's Reich, but by youthful rebellion against the political and social culture of the GDR's Communist regime. This is detailed in Fuehrer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Naxi by Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss (Random House, New York, 1996). This movement, however, eventually worked towards returning Germany to its former 'glory' under the Third Reich under the guidance of 'professional' Nazis.


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


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