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Did Himmler Really Like Gregorian Chant? The SS and Musicological Research

1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.1995.0057

1080-6601

Pamela M. Potter,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Did Himmler Really Like Gregorian Chant? The SS and Musicology Pamela M. Potter (bio) Anyone embarking on a study of scholarship in the Third Reich may encounter any combination of strange bedfellows, as a recent event called to our attention. In June 1995, The New York Times reported a story about a prominent German professor of literature who had assumed a false identity in order not to be linked with his past associations with the SS. The branch to which he belonged, the SS-Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage), was a research department that enlisted scholars from a variety of fields to investigate the Germanic race in all of its manifestations. The scholar, Hans Schwerter, alias Hans-Ernst Schneider, faces accusations that he was responsible for supplying medical equipment to be used for experiments on human subjects interned in concentration camps. The eighty-five-year-old professor emeritus and former rector of the Technical College in Aachen concedes that he changed his identity, but insists that his work with the Ahnenerbe focused mainly on folk dances. 1 The Ancestral Heritage branch of the SS has been known to historians for well over twenty years through Michael Kater’s painstaking reconstruction of its history and function in the Nazi state. 2 To the casual reader of The New York Times, however, the fact that the SS could simultaneously serve as the headquarters for organized mass murder and a research center for folk music poses a disturbing juxtaposition, and Schneider/ Schwerter’s explanation of his activities implies that we are to regard the two activities of the SS as mutually exclusive. A person who could immerse himself in the harmless and esoteric world of folk music could not possibly have any interest in dehumanization, torture, and extermination. But [End Page 45] cases of the harmless coexisting with the harmful, or of cultivation in an atmosphere of destruction, complete the list of Third Reich idiosyncrasies that range from individual personalities to entire organizations. We are allowed occasional glimpses of the elusive personality of Hitler as a vegetarian and an avid dog lover, while the quaint, manicured flower gardens gracing the headquarters at Auschwitz are maintained to this day to drive home the irony of their presence. The gross incongruities of the simultaneous cultivation of beauty, art, and knowledge alongside cruelty, destruction, and indoctrination spread into the realm of music, one of the most prized cultural treasures of Germany, and music scholarship, a discipline in which German scholars had played a leading role from the very beginning. Music had come to be regarded as central to defining the German nation in the era leading up to unification in 1871, preoccupying philosophers and novelists, and persisting as a key component in developing a national identity, especially after the defeat in World War I. 3 The music policy of the Nazi government further promoted art music as Germany’s cultural showpiece and cultivated amateur music and music education as a central daily activity, taking more care than its forerunners to sustain orchestras, opera houses, and choral and chamber groups in every town, great and small, and even rescuing private and semiprivate musical operations such as the Bayreuth Festival and the Berlin Philharmonic from total ruin by making them wards of the state. 4 But these measures were not without their own ironies: while stripping Jewish citizens of all rights and possessions, the government also made sure that the Jews had their own outlet for musical expression in the Jewish Culture League (Jüdischer Kulturbund), which allowed Jewish-staffed theater and opera companies, symphony orchestras, cabaret, and numerous choral and chamber music groups to perform Jewish works to Jewish audiences from 1933 to 1941. 5 Even in the concentration camps, bands and orchestras made up of inmates were vigilantly maintained in at least twenty locations, called upon to entertain SS officers stationed there and to drown out the sounds of torture. 6 Music scholarship also received unprecedented state support after Hitler came to power, despite the reputed anti-intellectual foundations of Nazi ideology and policy, and also became an accomplice to acts of racism and exploitation. Musicology had been in many ways a “German discipline,” with German-speaking scholars...