Opera, Community, and the Avant-Garde in Germany, 1932–1944

Musicians and cultural institutions in Nazi Germany saw opera as a means of eliminating the division between bourgeois art and everyday life in service of fostering an organic, racially-delimited Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). In pursuit of this political project, they turned to aesthetic strategies pioneered by the avant-garde movements of the Weimar Republic. This book traces the development of avant-garde music theatre in the Third Reich through local and national changes in patronage and musical craft, as modernist styles initially proscribed as ‘Bolshevik’, ‘un-German’, or, most notoriously, ‘degenerate’, were gradually co-opted by state and party institutions, particularly the cultural offices of arch-reactionary Alfred Rosenberg. New operas became at once a site of revolutionary communion and lavish propaganda for social policies, from establishing a new German identity through the collective trauma of World War I (Ludwig Maurick, Die Heimfahrt des Jörg Tilman) to the totalizing experience of military mobilization (Marc-André Souchay, Kampfwerk 39) and colonisation of Eastern Europe (Ernst Schliepe, Marienburg).Drawing from aesthetic theory, source studies, unpublished correspondence, as well as new archival sources, Opera, Community, and the Avant-Garde in Germany, 1932–1944 explores how musicians sought to adapt and enact the contradictions of Nazi ideology, rethinking both cultural policy in historical fascism and its implications for the contemporary avant-garde.