Goebbels: A Biography (48 page)

In the early years of the regime, Rosenberg’s doctrinaire policies had caused the propaganda minister several setbacks in the area of music. Rosenberg had managed to force Richard Strauss to resign as president of the Reich Music Chamber, and his uncompromising rejection of the composer Hindemith had not only induced the latter to emigrate but also led Goebbels to oppose Furtwängler and remove him from his position as deputy leader of the Reich Music Chamber. Moreover, Rosenberg’s National Socialist Cultural Community had brought large parts of German musical life under its control. It functioned as concert organizer, coordinator of guest appearances and music congresses, and publisher of the most important musical journal; it also supported its own record-listening circle.
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It was not until 1936 that Goebbels set up a separate music department in his ministry and appointed the conductor Heinz Drewes to lead it.
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Goebbels now attempted to strengthen his position in musical life. In autumn 1937, having assigned Drewes the task of “bringing the people to music,” he sought to strengthen Drewes’s position vis-à-vis the Reich Music Chamber, which since 1935 had been chaired by the conductor and musicologist Peter Raabe, a National Socialist.
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At the end of 1937 Drewes founded a Reich music office as a central censorship authority for music publishing.
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In spring 1938 Goebbels made a public bid for a leading role in music policy. On May 28, 1938, he gave a talk at the opening of the “Degenerate Music” exhibition, a ceremony introduced by Richard Strauss’s
Festive Prelude
, conducted by the composer in person.
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The opening of the show, based like the “Degenerate Art” exhibition on an initiative of Ziegler’s and reworked by Goebbels before the opening,
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pertained to the first “Reich Music Days” organized by
the Music Chamber. The exhibition denounced “atonality” in music as “degenerate” or “Jewish” and held up the composers Schönberg, Berg, Hindemith, Weill, and Stravinsky as particularly horrifying examples.

Goebbels began his opening speech
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with a summary of achievements meant to demonstrate the upturn in German musical life since 1933. He emphasized that the precondition for this upswing was the “de-jewification” of the German music scene, especially the elimination of “Jewish music criticism.”

He seized the opportunity to make a statement of intent, sketching out the future direction of German music under the heading of “Ten Principles of Music Creation.” Initially, these consisted of a whole litany of clichés: “To be unmusical is the same for a musical person as being blind or deaf. […] Music is the art that most profoundly moves the human soul. […] The language of notes is sometimes more effective than the language of words,” and so on. In general, what Goebbels’s “principles” amounted to was a commitment to “popular music.” Goebbels made the point, among others, that there was a place for “the kind of entertainment music that is acceptable to the broad masses.” The equation of entertainment with popularity allowed Goebbels to spread an ideological fog. If music arose from “mysterious and profound forces rooted in the national character,” then it could only be “formed and wielded by children of the people in accordance with the needs and the untamed musical drive of the nation.” This naturally meant grasping that “Judaism and German music” were “opposites,” which “by their nature contradict each other in the starkest manner.” Inevitably, a reference to Richard Wagner’s publication
Judaism in Music
followed from this. Goebbels’s “principles” ended with a paean of praise for Hitler, who had “torn German music from the threat of decadence” and for whom music represented an “essential life element.”

With this speech, Goebbels may have staked his claim to leadership in musical life, but there is every reason to doubt that he achieved a “reorientation” of German music. Goebbels, like the Nazi musicologists, was simply unable to define what “German music” actually was.
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Marking it off against “atonal,” “modern,” “Jewish,” and “degenerate music” served only to obscure this plain fact. So it is no accident that the “Ten Principles,” Goebbels’s main testimony to musical
life under National Socialism, should have been proclaimed precisely in the context of a “degenerate music” exhibition.

Such conceptual failings aside, the German music scene may have been too varied to allow the Propaganda Ministry to give it a unified direction: Musical theater and orchestral music, entertainment and dance music, amateur music and choirs, Party bands and other musical activities did not lend themselves to the imposition of one musical policy “line.”
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The law of May 15, 1934, relating to theaters
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had been used by the Propaganda Ministry, or to be more precise by its theater department (run from 1935 onward by Eugen Schlösser, who doubled as the “Reich dramaturge”), to secure a decisive influence on top theater appointments
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and maintain effective censorship of programming.
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This influence of the Propaganda Ministry on theater practice showed up in a few key tendencies. The works of Jewish and politically undesirable playwrights were prohibited; this amounted, in effect, to a ban on practically all existing contemporary drama. Nationalist and
völkisch
authors stepped into the breach. Foreign works were out (with the exception of Shakespeare, classified as a “Nordic poet,” and Shaw), and there was a heightened respect for the classics.
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Constituting 60 percent of productions, from 1934–35 onward contemporary German theater became the dominant genre, consisting mostly of comedies, “folk plays,” and the like, but a third of plays were “serious drama,” in other words more or less undisguised Nazi ideology onstage.
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To these were added quite a few older
völkisch
dramatists from the first three decades of the twentieth century.
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By and large, these general tendencies in programming corresponded to Goebbels’s personal taste in theater—with one significant exception. He was not fond of drama by
völkisch
and contemporary authors with close ties to National Socialism. His verdict on plays by Rudolf Billinger, highly regarded by Nazis as a “blood-and-soil” writer, was that they were “deadly dull” and “clumsy, stupid, and tasteless.”
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Goebbels was equally negative about Sigmund Graff’s First World
War play
Die endlose Strasse
(The Endless Road; Graff, who had started out in the Stahlhelm, was actually a consultant for the theater department of the Propaganda Ministry): “Really endless. […] Mind-numbing and pessimistic.”
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He characterized Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer’s
Heroische Leidenschaften
(Heroic Passions) as “heroic boredom. Terrible! It makes me sick, all this philosophizing on the stage. Should make something happen, not just blather on.”
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Herzog und Henker
(Duke and Executioner) by the
völkisch
poet Hermann Burte was “an unbearable jangle of words and verse without substance in problems or attitude. The whole thing a million miles from where we are.”
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This list of negative comments could go on.
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But there were exceptions: One play that appealed to him, for example, was Friedrich Bethge’s
Marsch der Veteranen
(Veterans’ March), a dramatization of the march by American ex-soldiers on Washington.
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Similarly, he praised Hanns Johst’s
Thomas Paine
(note that Johst was president of the Reich Chamber of Literature) as a “first-class revolutionary drama.”
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He particularly liked
Das Frankenburger Würfelspiel
(The Frankenburg Dice Game), written by the German Prize winner for 1935, Eberhard Wolfgang Möller; Goebbels became personally involved in directing the play when it was performed in the open-air theater in the Olympic Park during the Games.
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But all in all, Goebbels seemed quite unconvinced by the idea that Nazi dramas could give the German stage an entirely new look.

Hence Goebbels preferred to promote established authors. This corresponded to his personal taste, as recorded in many comments on theater productions. Among great German writers it was Friedrich Schiller he loved best, the most-performed German classical author in the Third Reich.
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“Great Schiller, what bunglers we have,” wrote Goebbels after a performance of
Maria Stuart
at the Berlin Volksbühne (People’s Theater).
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He admired Shakespeare even more, and indeed after 1933 Shakespeare competed with Schiller for the title of most-performed author.
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The English playwright, said the propaganda minister after seeing a production of
Coriolanus
in 1937, was “more relevant and modern than all the moderns. What a huge genius! How he towers over Schiller!”
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He shared with Hitler
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a strong predilection for George Bernard Shaw, possibly because he thought of the Irish dramatist as “more journalist than
[creative] writer.”
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After a performance of
Saint Joan
in August 1936 he praised “Shaw’s sparkling ideas and wit. Brilliant mockery! A man after my own heart.”
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On the other hand, Goebbels by no means despised light entertainment and robust folk comedies.
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When the Theater Law was passed in 1934, Göring obtained for himself the privilege of controlling the fate of several theaters under his jurisdiction. Thus the propaganda minister had no influence on the Prussian state theaters, as for example the Schauspielhaus am Gendarmenmarkt (a Berlin playhouse) and the State Opera. In 1934 Göring appointed Gustaf Gründgens director of the State Theater. Shortly after his appointment Gründgens showed that he was perfectly willing to cooperate with Goebbels. “I shall take him under my wing,” wrote Goebbels patronizingly after a conversation with him, but in fact it turned out that for the most part Gründgens was quite capable of preserving “his” theater’s independence from the Propaganda Ministry.
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From the mid-1930s onward, Goebbels began to set up several first-class “Reich theaters” in opposition to these top houses; the Reich theaters were run directly by the Propaganda Ministry, and Goebbels took a deep personal interest in them.
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Not the least of his objectives was to convince Hitler—they often went to the theater together—of the superiority of Goebbels’s taste in drama and to demonstrate his leading role in shaping the life of the German stage. The Reich theaters included the Städtische Oper (Metropolitan Opera) in Berlin, which passed into state ownership in March 1934 and then traded under the name Deutsche Oper (German Opera); the former Theater des Westens (Theater of the West), leased in 1934 by the Reich, after which it was the Volksoper (People’s Opera); the Deutsches Theater (German Theater) after August 1934; the Volksbühne (People’s Stage), which after 1933 gradually came under the direct influence of the Propaganda Ministry; and the former Grosses Schauspielhaus (Grand Playhouse), which the Propaganda Ministry ran jointly after 1933 as the Theater des Volkes (Theater of the People).

Goebbels stayed in close contact with the directors of the houses. He regularly discussed the situation of his theater with Eugen Erich Orthmann of the Volksoper without being particularly interested in his productions, which were standard opera repertoire.
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He took
more interest in the other theaters, however. With Hans Hilpert, whom he had moved in April 1934 from the Volksbühne to the Deutsches Theater,
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he went over repertoires and the acquisition of new artists,
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as he did with the director of the Volksbühne, Eugen Klöpfer
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(the first director to follow Hilpert at the Volksbühne was the Nazi activist Count Bernhard Solms, but Goebbels soon came to regard his appointment as a mistake).
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Klöpfer managed to cling to his position until 1944 and the demise of theater in the Third Reich, but Goebbels took an increasingly critical view of him.
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With Wilhelm Rode, head of the Deutsche Oper, Goebbels discussed not just appointments but also individual productions.
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In January 1935, when he was dissatisfied with a performance of
Boccaccio
at the Deutsche Oper (and Hitler was “not very enthusiastic” either), he summoned Rode and gave him a severe dressing-down. Goebbels offered Rode a chance to redeem himself with the forthcoming production of
Tristan
, which he liked very much. Even so, a few days later he presented Rode with some “directing notes.”
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A week later he took in the production again, accompanied by Hitler this time: “My notes on direction have been put into effect. […] Führer enthusiastic.”
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This was not the only direct intervention by the theater enthusiast Goebbels: In 1936, just before the performance was due, he made some changes to a review staged by the Kraft durch Freude organization in the Theater des Volkes to celebrate May 1. When he saw the premiere the next day, he was happy with the results of his intervention.
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In 1938 Goebbels obtained control of two more Berlin theaters. He nationalized the Nollendorftheater in Berlin and appointed the actor and director Harald Paulsen as director, mainly to put on operettas;
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at the same time, he made Heinrich George director of the city-owned Schillertheater, thus gaining a powerful influence over that house too.
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Furthermore, in the same year and the next, respectively, he acquired two further Berlin operetta theaters for the Reich: the Admiralspalast (Admiral’s Palace) and the Metropoltheater (Metropole Theater).
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In all, Goebbels presided over a considerable number of venues in Berlin that were directly under his influence, and this enabled him to showcase in all the important genres—operetta, opera, folk theater, and contemporary and classical drama—what he conceived as suitably representative theater in the National Socialist state.