scholarly journals Paul von Klenau og hans niende symfoni. Kilderne, værket, receptionen

Author(s):  
Niels Krabbe

Niels Krabbe: Paul von Klenau and his ninth Symphony – the sources, the work, the reception In 2001, the Royal Library learned about a comprehensive private collection in Vienna that contained music, letters and lecture manuscripts, photographs and other archive materials of the Danish composer Paul von Klenau (1883–1946). A preliminary survey of the collection revealed that the contents included a number of music manuscripts (symphonies, chamber music concerts and more), which were not known from the rest of the library’s major collection of Klenau works. The collection’s greatest and most interesting work was a major complete “Ninth Symphony” for orchestra, choir and four soloists in eight movements, for a Latin text with a mix of liturgical texts from the Catholic requiem and texts of unknown provenance.In 2005, the library succeeded in acquiring the collection and it was transferred to the Royal Library. Subsequently, the Danish Centre for Music Publication (DCM) organised a philological adaptation and published Symphony No. 9 for the purpose of the premier performance of the work, which duly took place 70 years after it was written, performed as a Thursday Concert in March 2014 and conducted by Michael Schønwandt.Klenau had worked in Germany as a composer and conductor in the 1920s and 1930s. He returned to Denmark in 1939 where he stayed for the rest of his life. Because of his extensive German background he did not receive high recognition in Danish music, despite the range and nature of his musical output. This was mainly because of his relationship with the Third Reich and Nazism, which affected his last years and his posthumous reputation.Symphony No. 9 was composed in the years 1944–45, and is a mix of requiem and a symphony, each in four movements. Due to the text, the work is both a traditional requiem and a requiem about the war. Both in its expression and in its length, it is probably the greatest symphony ever written by a Danish composer.The premier in 2014 received mixed reviews, and Klenau’s attitude to Nazism was discussed once again. The work was criticised for its eclectic character with its mix of late romantic forms of expression on the one side and its accomplished dodecaphonic passages on the other.The newly available Klenau collection from Vienna, including the treated Symphony No. 9, has nuanced and problematised Klenau’s position in Danish music history.

2021 ◽  
pp. 336-356
Author(s):  
Peter Fritzsche

This chapter studies how the transformations which occurred in less than “one hundred days” in Germany evoked the original template for the one hundred days: Napoleon Bonaparte's return from Elba and the reestablishment of the empire until his abdication in the wake of Waterloo in 1815. Each of the hundred days—Napoleon's, Franklin D. Roosevelt's, and Adolf Hitler's—recharged history. The one hundred days consolidating the New Deal and the Nazi seizure of power gave new shape to the future in the extraordinary year of 1933. Ultimately, the great achievement of the Third Reich was getting Germans to see themselves as the Nazis did: as an imperiled people who had created for themselves a new lease on collective life. Not everyone agreed with the Nazis on every point, but most adjusted to National Socialism by interpreting it in their own way, adhering to old ideas by pursuing them in new forms. As a result, more and more Germans had accepted the Third Reich. This reassembly closed off any consideration of returning to the democratic governments of the Weimar Republic; it was neither recognized as a possibility nor desired.


2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anselm Gerhard

Recent studies of musicology under the Nazi regime make it plausible to reach some conclusions, drawing particularly on four case studies: Heinrich Besseler, Friedrich Blume, Hans Joachim Moser, and (as a counterexample) Alfred Einstein. First, musicology is a small discipline and in 1933 was even smaller, making it particularly open to intrigue. Personal loyalties were more important than political and ideological ones; patriarchal teacher-student relations had more weight than factions born of clashes between rival groups within the National Socialist regime. Second, musicology is a decidedly German discipline: Into the 1930s, it existed as a university subject largely in the three German-speaking countries. A tradition of musicological scholarship that was firmly convinced of the preeminence of its own national heritage did not need to accommodate itself in the first place to the German jingoism of the National Socialists. On the contrary, scholars had perhaps more freedom because their national orientation could never seriously be doubted. Third, music as a conceptless art was not easily subsumed under "racial" and "vöölkisch" constructs. Many during the "third Reich" tried to explain European music history by drawing on the spirit of contemporary studies of race, but they often had to admit the difficulty if not the utter failure of the enterprise. In comparison with other disciplines it is noticeable that only those outside the university formulated overwhelmingly racist accounts of music history, and they could not pass muster with their nationalist or National Socialist colleagues. Finally, university musicologists, no less than their colleagues active in the Amt Rosenberg or in the Propagandaministerium, shared responsibility for a discourse of exclusion and vöölkisch terror both inside and outside the country. Culpability must be investigated individually, but a look at the field as a whole makes it possible to understand how after 1945, musicologists in the two Germanys and Austria could without difficulty resume work broken off before the final collapse of the National Socialist regime.


2019 ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Viktor Melnyk

Objective of the study: to classify and identify the main causes of the process of political self-destruction of the German ethnic minority in the territory of Czechoslovakia; to propose, substantiate and introduce into scientific circulation the concept of political self-destruction of the German community in the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which existed under the suzerainty of the Third Reich from March 15, 1939 to May 13, 1945. Methodology: Therefore, the journalistic and literary works of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were analyzed, as well as legal documents and diplomatic protocols adopted following the Yalta Conference (February 4 — F ebruary 11, 1945), the Potsdam Conference (July 17 — August 2, 1945). With the help of the traditional complex of historical and legal methods (text study, comparative analysis, legal analogy), were analyzed the content and external forms of legal succession of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in relation to the First Czechoslovak Republic (October 28, 1918 — September 30, 1938) and the Second Czechoslovak Republic (September 30, 1938 — March 15, 1939). Structural and functional method allowed to isolate the main reasons for the successful cultural and socio-economic coexistence of Germans and Czechs in the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under the auspices of the Third Reich in 1939–1945. The socio-psychological approach, in turn, determined the political-political characterization of the rise of interethnic hostility of the Czechs to the Germans. The article argues that the cause of the massacres of Germans by Czech fighters (actions with clear signs of genocide) during 1945–1950 was the transfer of the so-called «guilt for Soviet occupation» by the Czech collective consciousness to the Germans. With the help of English and Soviet propaganda, a negative image of the Germans in the mass media was simultaneously formed. Results and conclusions: The history of the Czechoslovak Republic of 1918–1939 is a prime example of the confrontation between spatial and ethno-linguistic political ideologues. On the one hand, there were Sudeten and Bohemian Germans, supported by the strong movement of the Nazis. On the other hand, the concept of Central European Slavic integration, known as «Czechoslovakism». The struggle between these two ideologues often falls out of sight of contemporary political scientists (political scientists) and historians. This article does not fill the gap, but aims to demonstrate the Czech-German ethno-political conflict of the mid-twentieth century in the form of a logical sequence of events that led to the collapse of both Pan-Germanism and Czechoslovakism. The bloody war between the Slavs and the Germans in the center of Europe ended with the victory of «third power» — ideology of communism.


2020 ◽  
pp. 91-116
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran

This chapter examines the changes to Jewish war veterans' legal status after the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and the ways in which many of these men tried to retain their sense of Germanness in the face of intensifying state-sponsored terror and persecution. Although the Nazis succeeded in banning Jews from the civil service and most veterans' organizations, this did not mean that Jewish veterans were abruptly cast to the margins of German public life. Not all Germans shared Himmler's radical vision of a racially purified Volksgemeinschaft. This inconsistency in experience — persecution on the one hand, and limited solidarity with the German public on the other — obscured the gravity of the Nazi threat, leading many Jewish veterans to contemplate accommodation with the Third Reich.


2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernd Gausemeier

During the Third Reich, the biological institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft) underwent a substantial reorganization and modernization. This paper discusses the development of projects in the fields of biochemical genetics, virus research, radiation genetics, and plant genetics that were initiated in those years. These cases exemplify, on the one hand, the political conditions for biological research in the Nazi state. They highlight how leading scientists advanced their projects by building close ties with politicians and science-funding organizations and companies. On the other hand, the study examines how the contents of research were shaped by, and how they contributed to, the aims and needs of the political economy of the Nazi system. This paper therefore aims not only to highlight basic aspects of scientific development under Nazism, but also to provide general insights into the structure of the Third Reich and the dynamics of its war economy.


2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 80-93
Author(s):  
Steven M. Whiting

After Different Drummers (1992) and The Twisted Muse (1997), MichaelH. Kater has presented Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits, as“the last in a trilogy on the interrelationship between sociopoliticalforces on the one side, and music and musicians in the Third Reich,on the other” (264). The author is Distinguished Research Professorof History at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies(York University). The author of the present review, a musicologist,must express his gratitude to Professor Kater for helping tomake it professionally unacceptable to restrict oneself anymore to“the music itself” when considering certain composers active in Germanyof the 1930s. By the same token, Kater’s reticence about “themusic itself” (which presumably springs from humility) will leavemany a musicologist itching to adduce (if not consult) the scores toconfirm or to contest Kater’s points, for Kater is writing about lives,not works, unless the works have impinged on biographical issues.


Author(s):  
Eric Kurlander

This chapter examines the regime's policies toward occultists in the early to middle years of the Third Reich, including ‘Hitler's Magicians' Controversy’ — a debate over whether to allow professional anti-occultists to debunk ‘magic’ and occultism. When the regime worked to repress or ‘coordinate’ esoteric groups, it had more to do with controlling than eliminating occult ideas. Indeed, like border scientists generally, many Nazis worked carefully to distinguish between commercial and popular occultism on the one hand and ‘scientific’ occultism on the other. While the Nazis indicated considerable hostility toward commercial occultism, practitioners of the scientific variety enjoyed remarkable latitude, even sponsorship, by the Third Reich. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the ‘Hess Action’ against the occult and its longer term consequences.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 163-168
Author(s):  
Maria Zmierczak

REFLECTIONS ON SEBASTIAN FIKUS’S TRUDNY SPADEK DYSYDENTÓW III RZESZY W REPUBLICE FEDERALNEJ NIEMIEC DIFFICULT LEGACY OF THE THIRD REICH’S DISSIDENTS IN FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANYThe reviewed book contains a description of state policy towards the German opponents of Hitler’s regime after the fall of the Third Reich. The death sentences of military courts, Volksgericht and special war courts were treated as legal and the victims and their descendants were not vindicated until 2009. It means that they figured as criminals for more than 50 years. The author suggests that this was connected mainly with economic reasons and the need to restore the national economy. The commentary of the reviewer underlines the importance of other aspects: on the one hand, it was not easy to declare that the Federal Republic of Germany is a new state and to break the continuity of state, especially in the face of the existing German Democratic Republic. On the other hand, it is not easy to declare that the law was not legal, and to punish judges or officers who had acted according to the legal prescriptions; not to mention the old sentence lex retro non agit. 


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.


1999 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilma J. Busse ◽  
Martina Emme ◽  
Rosalie Gerut ◽  
Jacqueline G. Lapidus

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